Podgorica in a day

Stara Varoš

Podgorica’s old town fits into an hour’s walk, and that alone tells you what happened here. It’s the Ottoman quarter, east of the Ribnica river, with narrow crooked streets, some low houses and two mosques. It survived by a miracle and by geography: it sat apart from the centre the planes were aiming at.

The quarter’s symbol is the Sahat Kula, the clock tower, eighteenth century, planted in a small square. It isn’t spectacular and doesn’t try to be, but it’s one of the very few things in the capital that was here before the war. That’s what orients you: for centuries Podgorica was an Ottoman frontier town, and all that remains of it is this tower, a couple of mosques and a few streets.

The rest was swept away in a few months of 1944.

The Cathedral of the Resurrection

A vast new Orthodox cathedral, consecrated in 2014, with two bell towers and an interior covered in frescoes done the traditional way. You can go in and most people do, look up for ten minutes and leave. The whole visit is in one detail almost nobody looks for.

In the Last Judgement fresco, among the damned, Tito, Marx and Engels are painted burning in hell. It isn’t an urban legend or an interpretation: they’re there, identifiable, and when the church was consecrated it caused considerable controversy inside and outside the country.

Think about what that means: the city was called Titograd for nearly half a century and in its new cathedral they painted Tito in hell. That fresco tells this country’s politics better than any museum.

Gorica hill

The city’s name comes from here, literally: Podgorica means “under the Gorica”, and the Gorica is this small pine-covered hill planted in the middle of the urban fabric. It’s the answer to the question of what to do in Podgorica once you’ve seen the four monuments: go up.

It’s a forest park with paths, and from the top you understand the city at a glance: the grid of the new centre, the blocks to the west, the two rivers and, behind, the mountains that make this place an oven in summer, because Podgorica sits in a hollow. At the top there’s a Second World War partisan memorial. The climb is short, the shade is welcome and in the evening it’s full of locals running, which is itself a fact: it’s the city’s park, not an attraction.

The two rivers and the Millennium Bridge

Podgorica has two rivers, the Morača and the Ribnica, and they meet inside the city. That confluence is the original site: there you’ll find the remains of the Ribnica fortress and an old stone bridge, still crossing the water without going anywhere in particular. That bridge and the clock tower are almost all that’s left of the earlier Podgorica.

A little further on is the Millennium Bridge, from 2005, a white cable-stayed span that’s what the city puts on postcards and what gets lit at night. The comparison is the whole story in two kilometres of river: a stone bridge nobody can date precisely and another from twenty years ago that’s already the capital’s symbol.

In summer, besides, the Morača bank is where people get in to swim, because the water comes down cold from the mountains and at forty degrees that isn’t an anecdote.