A short list of books that help make sense of Kotor and Montenegro. Rebecca West for the cultural texture, Njegoš for the foundational national myths the country still draws on, and Đilas for what life inside the communist project actually looked like for the people who built it.
Balkan Ghosts — Kaplan's 1993 journalist's account of the Balkans on the eve of and during the Yugoslav wars has been criticised — fairly — for over-emphasising ancient hatreds at the expense of contemporary political choices. But the Kotor chapter is a small classic of place writing: the cruise-ship ghosts, the cats in the cathedral square, the late-Yugoslav quiet before the storms of the early 1990s.
The book had real-world consequences: famously, Bill Clinton kept his diplomats reading it during the Bosnia debates, and some commentators argued that its tone helped delay American intervention. Read with a critical eye, but read it for the texture.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon — Rebecca West's vast 1941 travel book on Yugoslavia remains the indispensable account of the region. The Kotor chapters, in the second volume, are an extraordinary piece of cultural reading — the bay, the cathedral, the relationship between the coastal towns and the inland tribes — written by someone who understood both the Mediterranean and Slavic strands of the place and refused to flatten either.
It is long, opinionated, and not always reliable on details, but no later writer has matched the depth of West's reading of why this corner of Europe is the way it is. Read at least the chapters on the Boka and Cetinje before a serious visit.
Land Without Justice — Milovan Đilas was the most important Yugoslav dissident of the communist period — Tito's wartime deputy, then his most prominent prisoner — and Land Without Justice (1958) is his memoir of growing up in Montenegro before the Second World War. The country he describes is a hard, poor, code-bound place, full of blood feuds and proud silences, that has almost vanished from the modern coast.
The chapters on Kolašin and the upland villages around Lovćen are the best counterpoint to the picturesque-bay version of Montenegro that tourists see today. Read after a visit to the Lovćen mausoleum, when the question of where the Montenegrin national imagination came from is still on your mind.
The Mountain Wreath — The Mountain Wreath (1847) is Montenegro's national epic — a verse drama in decasyllabic lines describing the legendary 18th-century massacre of converts to Islam in Montenegro, sometimes called the Istraga poturica. The text is the foundational document of modern Montenegrin national identity, and its language echoes through political speeches, school texts, and casual conversation across the country.
It is also a difficult and morally compromised text — the violence at its centre has been used to justify later violence — and reading it is a way into the more uncomfortable questions about Balkan nationalism. The Vasa D. Mihailovich English verse translation is the standard. The author lies buried at the summit of Lovćen above Kotor.