Published
'Montenegro: Accursed Mountains, Enchanted Mountains' (issue 20, May 2008)
First published in hidden europe, issue 20
'My soul hankered ever after Gusinje. Gusinje, said everyone, was impossible... No-one would take the risk of piloting me... The natives would admit no stranger. In former days a consul or two had visited it with an escort. Lately it had become the Lhasa of Europe, closed to all; though several had tried.' Edith Durham, High Albania (London, 1909)Few are the visitors who probe Montenegro’s mountainous border with northern Albania. It is a fascinating and remote area, a spectacular landscape of isolated valleys and fang-like peaks, with a long and compelling history. Lying at the headwaters of the River Tara and the River Lim, and marching with the narrow finger of territory which forms the northern tip of Albania, this area constitutes one of the wildest remaining corners of Europe.
The best-known area of these mountains is Prokletije (Bjeshket e Nemuna in Albanian). Meaning ‘the accursed mountains’, Prokletije was, according to local folklore, created by the devil himself, unleashed from hell for a single day of mischief. Scoured by glaciers during the last ice age, the landscape shows all the hallmarks of a region shaped by ice: glaciated cirques and broad, U-shaped valleys. Glaciation in the Prokletije region actually occurred at a much lower altitude than elsewhere in the Balkans, or even in the Alps. Experts say that a glacier in the Plav-Gusinje area, the largest in the region, was about thirty-five kilometres long and some two hundred metres thick. Above the ice-worn valleys the skyline bristles with jagged limestone crags, the northern slopes of which carry snow well into the summer. The physical character of the terrain is reflected in such exotically named peaks as Ocnjak (‘fang’) and Karanfili (‘carnations’).
Sitting at the edge of these mountains is the small town of Gusinje. In some ways Gusinje appears to have the conservative, rather remote feel of a village far removed from western Europe. Yet at promenade time during the late afternoon and early evening, its streets are awash with miniskirts and designer jeans. Gusinje boasts a stone-walled mosque with the distinctive wooden minaret so characteristic of the area. There is a similar, slightly smaller mosque in the village of Vusanje, a little further up the valley.
But not all is quaint and beautiful. Gusinje has its share of concrete utilitarian housing offset by many new and remarkably large mansions, owned by Albanian expats and returning émigrés. For over forty years there has been a steady stream of ethnic Albanians moving from this region of Montenegro to the United States. Now some are coming back.
It all makes for a rather odd mixture. While sitting outside the Sar café in Gusinje (which serves some of the best burek I have ever tasted), after a walk to the head of the Ropojana valley, I was told the story of the arrival of a new Ferrari in Gusinje. The roads were too rough for it to be driven, so it had to be brought to its owner’s house on a truck, where it remains confined to the garage.
The head of the Grbaja valley, Prokletije (Nikon D200, Nikkor 28mm f/2)
Stretching roughly southwest from Gusinje, the Grbaja valley runs past scattered houses to a series of open meadows, enclosed by a wall of limestone peaks. There is a small mountain hut near the head of the valley, called dom Radnicki, run by a climbing club in Belgrade. The shadows of Montenegro’s only recently severed ties with Serbia are everywhere. While I was staying at dom Radnicki, the leader of an experienced group of climbers from Belgrade fell during the steep descent from Karanfili’s Sjeverni vrh (North Peak), which rises near the head of the Grbaja valley. His team mates had been filming him at the time of the accident, and later that evening, sitting in the mountain hut and fortified with liberal quantities of homemade rakija (that quintessential local spirit) and Niksicko Pivo (Montenegro’s favourite beer), the old veteran — who had miraculously survived the incident with no more than a few cuts and bruises — relived his fall a dozen times on the monitor of a small camera, while his friends gathered round him and slapped him amiably on the back.
To the southeast of the Grbaja valley is the Ropojana valley, which stretches into the wilds beyond Vusanje up to a lonely and quite magically beautiful lake, full in some years, the water vanishing in others like a mirage. A stream, nicely called the Skakavica, which means grasshopper, dances down the valley before disappearing into the rock in a roaring vortex of a cascade. Above the Ropojana valley is Maja Kolata, at 2528m the highest peak in Montenegro. Ignore the guidebooks, which wrongly award this accolade to Bobotov kuk (2523m) in the Durmitor region. Walking through the Ropojana valley in 2006 the only human souls we encountered were Albanian children gathering wild strawberries. Perhaps it was these same children who left a small pile of stones on the bonnet of our car, with its Podgorica number plates, which was parked at the end of the asphalt road — as if just to let us know that this valley was their territory.
Rough mountain passes link both valleys with Albania, but permission from the local police is required for foreigners to cross them. Registration with the local police in Gusinje is in any case mandatory for foreign visitors — Prokletije remains, officially at least, a sensitive border area. So long as you are only visiting the Grbaja and Ropojana valleys, this is in most cases purely a formality, and only requires showing a passport and stating where you intend to stay. Saying that you plan to follow an unmarked trail over a mountain pass into Albania will of course generate rather more paperwork!
The heady beauty of the landscape is matched in equal measure by its human interest. Indeed, as is often the case, the physical character of the landscape has in many ways shaped the lives of its inhabitants and the course of their history. Illyrian tribes in the area, for example, were among the last to surrender to the Romans, one veteran of the Roman campaigns in the area describing these wayward Illyrians as almost unconquerable, so protected were they in their mountain strongholds.
A trade route once ran through the Ropojana valley, linking it, and the village of Gusinje, with the Valbona and Shala valleys in northern Albania. Its position on this trade route, at the confluence of both the Grbaja and Ropojana valleys gave Gusinje considerable regional importance. From Gusinje, traders could head down-valley towards the Adriatic or cross the Cakor pass over to Pec in Kosovo. However, with the shifting of political borders during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the resulting decrease in trade, Gusinje’s importance waned, and the town of Plav, set further back from the ramparts of the mountains, developed into the more important regional centre.
Following her energetic part in the anti-Ottoman wars of 1876–1878, Montenegro was awarded the districts of Gusinje and Plav, along with other Albanian areas, at the Congress of Berlin (1878). This settlement led to massive armed resistance on the part of many Albanians, and ongoing territorial disputes with local Albanian tribes, especially around Gusinje, prompting the English traveller Edith Durham to describe the largely porous Montenegrin-Albanian border as “floating in blood”. Unable to maintain its hold on Plav and Gusinje, Montenegro was forced to accept instead the port of Ulcinj as a compromise; and it was only some years later, following the First Balkan War (1913), that Gusinje and Plav became part of Montenegro. It should therefore come as little surprise that there is still a large Albanian population in Prokletije.
Kom Vasojevicki, Kom Kucki and Kom Ljevorijecki from Stavna, Komovi (Nikon D200, Nikkor 28mm f/2)
Slightly to the west of Prokletije, across the other side of that northern tip of Albania that juts into Montenegro, lie two further mountain areas of interest: Komovi and Kucka krajina (also sometimes called Zijevo). The latter is if anything even less known than Prokletije,despite its comparative proximity to the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica. The sudden view of the Kucka krajina peaks on reaching a pass, some seven kilometres up an unsealed road from Verusa, across the intervening lake and cottages of Bukumirsko jezero, is lovely indeed.
The legacy of Montenegro’s tribal and clan-based history survives in the names of the main peaks of Komovi (Komovi simply being the plural of the noun kom): Kom Vasojevicki, Kom Kucki and Kom Ljevorijecki, each summit named after a tribe of that name. The pastures below these same peaks were divided between these tribes in the nineteenth century. Legend tells that the tribes piled stones on the summits of their namesakes, each vying to claim as its own the highest of the three peaks.
Like elsewhere in the mountains of Montenegro, the landscape is dotted with katun — small cottages which locals move up to during the summer months, driving their sheep and cattle with them. As the last of the winter snow melts away, the animals graze on lush pastures while the seasonal migrants from the valleys grow vegetables and make cheese. At Bukumirsko jezero, a scattered settlement on the edge of the wonderfully jumbled mass of rocky peaks and dells which is the Kucka krajina region, many of the locals come up from Bioce, a small town just north of Podgorica. One particularly hospitable family called us over to their house as we were returning from a long day’s walk, to ply us with cheese, kiselo mljeko (a refreshing, slightly sour milk drink) and deliciously crusty homemade bread, as we sat in the shade of a tree in their garden. Typically built of either wood or stone, some katun are long abandoned, and their ruined shells punctuate the landscape of any walk through the Montenegrin highlands.
Katun (summer cottages), on Bjelasica, just north of Komovi (Nikon FM2n, Nikkor 20mm f/2.8)
The area is also home to numerous species of plants and animals, many of them peculiar to this part of Montenegro, in some cases even to a particular lake or tarn — such as an endemic species of alpine newt, which is to be found swimming lazily among long, waving water weed, in a shallow pond beneath the rugged summits of Stitan and Pasjak in Kucka krajina.
It seems remarkable, then, that this uniquely beautiful region of Montenegro has not yet been designated a national park. This is to be explained perhaps by the marginal location of Prokletije and adjacent ranges, and the proximity of the frontier with Albania. These border mountains are not so inscribed on the national psyche as Lovcen and Durmitor, both of which are national parks. Prokletije missed out on designated park status when Montenegro was linked with Serbia. Now, in newly-independent Montenegro, it is back on the agenda.
There is an international effort to promote and protect this region under the auspices of the Balkans Peace Park Project, which last autumn was runner-up in a competition to identify the best new ecologically sensitive tourism development in the world — nominated, appropriately enough, by Nicky Gardner of hidden europe. The proposed area of the Balkans Peace Park covers a huge tract of territory, spanning the borders of Montenegro, Albania and Kosovo, and including, on the Montenegrin side of the border, Prokletije, Komovi and Kucka krajina. Cross border treks, organised with the blessing of the local authorities, have traversed the mountains, linking valleys long divided by international frontiers. Find out more about this initiative at www.balkanspeacepark.org.
Awarding Prokletije and adjacent areas national park status would not only help ensure that they are protected and preserved, but also generate valuable revenue for local inhabitants as small scale tourism develops in the region. And we must hope that, as this remote and outstandingly beautiful area of Europe slowly opens up, it will be developed in an understated and sympathetic manner — one that respects the region’s rich combination of natural beauty and cultural heritage.
Evening light on Ocnjak ('fang') and the Karanfili ('carnations') peaks, above the Grbaja valley, Prokletije (Nikon D200, Nikkor 28mm f/2)
Text and photographs copyright Rudolf Abraham 2008
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