#Sutomore | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bu1410 · 9 months ago

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''Mr. Plant has owed me a shoe since July 5, 1971." - Chapter III - March 5th, 2024

Bari - Italy

Bar - Montenegro

Kotor - Montenegro

Sveti Stefan - Montenegro

Dubrovnik - Croatia

Lake Skadar - Montenegro.

BAR - MONTENEGRO- FORMER YUGOSLAVIA – October 1982

I returned from Saudi Arabia quite disappointed by the behavior of the Works Director, Eng. Birago. I liked the Taif hospital project, but I think the old Engineer had the whiskey affair tied to his finger, and at the first opportunity he got rid of me. I therefore responded with enthusiasm to the call from VOLANI, a company from Rovereto (Trento, Italy) specialized in industrialized architecture, essentially a direct competitor of FEAL Milan. I went to Rovereto for the interview with the Chief of Staff ''accompanied by Mother''! In the sense that my mother, as soon as she learned that I was going to Rovereto, immediately jumped on the car: beyond the desire to go around, it was one of her favorite destinations! The interview went well, and I was offered a job at their construction site in Bar, Montenegro, then still a territory of Yugoslavia. Before leaving for Bar, I wanted to spend a weekend in Madesimo, in Italian Alps. In 1981 there was no Internet, and therefore we had not booked the hotel. When we were in Medesimo we soon realized that the hotels were all closed (we learned that October/November are the months in which hoteliers go on holiday). In the end we turned to the local Carabinieri station, who suggested we go up to Alpe Motta where there was an alpine refuge that was definitely open.

JOURNEY TO BAR I had bought a new jacket, grey/blue on the outside, and with yellow padding on the inside. I took the flight to Bari, and then from Palese airport a taxi took me to the port. The ferry to Bar would leave in the evening. I enjoyed a single cabin, and the crossing of the Adriatic was uneventful. In the morning, when I tried to open the cabin door, I bumped into the bodies of those less fortunate than me, who had spent the night sleeping on the floor in the ship's corridor. We went ashore, and I noticed that I was surrounded by the usual dozens of women who at the time were shuttling between Italy and Yugoslavia, bringing all sorts of merchandise to their country. One of them, a middle-aged woman, asked me in in somewhat broken Italian:

Do you have something to declare?

No….

Well, it means that you will go through customs with these bottles of cognac, these shoes and these t-shirts on my behalf.

Ok…… Once we passed the customs control, the woman hurried to collect her goods, and she didn't even say thank you!!. I had made a first approach to the typical rudeness of Montenegrins; I would later have to experience other, even worse examples.

HOTEL SUTOMORE At the port exit there was the Site Manager waiting for me. A nice gentleman originally from Mantua: middle-aged, beard, open smile, had already been in Bar for several months with his wife and a few-month-old daughter in tow. He took me to the Hotel Sutomore, located in a village of a same name, a few kilometers north of Bar. The semi-deserted hotel given the season, a 9-storey building, was directly on the small but beautiful beach - the transparent sea reflected the sun of the afternoon that has just begun. It was lunch time, and after a shower, I went to the hotel restaurant, located on the mezzanine. Very large dining room, on Saturdays it was always occupied by receptions and weddings, with horseshoe tables, full of bottles of whiskey as per local custom. (Perhaps this is the reason why wedding dinners often resulted in furious arguments between relatives and friends?) I sat down in the half-empty room, took off my jacket and placed it on the back of the chair in front of me. The waiter, a young man around 20-22 years old, appeared out of nowhere, and without saying a word he took off his white jacket, took my jacket and put it on. -It's fine with me - he said, looking satisfied in the large window - how much do you want?

I looked at him astonished, with a mixture of surprise and anger and told him: it's not for sale, take it off immediately.

And he: but why not? Here all foreigners do this?!

''As well as? I said annoyed.

In the sense that they come wearing new things, sell them to us, and then leave again.

Well - I replied - I'm not "everyone" and I bought the jacket for myself - end of negotiation.

Oh well… if you say so….

What is there to eat? And here was the second unpleasant impact with another locals.

NIGHTCLUB Below the hotel there was a disco-dance hall. On Saturday evening it was packed, with a musical group that performed a Slavic variant of the rock songs popular in the 80s. The evenings inevitably ended in fights, to which alcohol, which was consumed in large quantities, made a substantial contribution. One evening I was at the entrance of the club, and an obviously drunk guy, with the help of a chair, demolished all the telephone booths positioned at the entrance of the club. I asked the girl at the checkout why no one called the police.

It's better not - she replied - things would take a worse turn - and in any case we know who he is, and the police will show up at his house around 5.00 am tomorrow, when he will be sleeping and will be unable to resist.

Ah… okay – I said.

OUR PROJECT The project consisted of the construction of a building for the Municipality of Bar, one to be use by the new Court, plus a school complex. Also included in the same contract were the rehabilitation of an analysis laboratory building in the hospital of Podgorica, 50 km inside Montenegro, as well as the capital of the state - The construction of a clinic in Ulcinj, 26 km south of Bar, the last city in Montenegro next to Albania border. In view of the supervision and some particular processes in which Italian labor was used, the bulk of the workers employed in the project were Yugoslavians. I noticed a detail that I remembered later, when the war broke out in Yugoslavia in the 1990s: carpenters, bricklayers, structure assemblers, were organized into ethnic groups (Slovenes – Serbs – Croats etc) and had no relationship between them. The construction time was from 7.00 in the morning to 2.00 in the afternoon - at 10.00 am there was a break, during which meals were consumed, sometimes cooked on site, with improvised barbecues. All the buildings were of a high standard, with continuous aluminum facades - the Bar complex stood out for a certain elegance, and the imprint of Italian design and materials immediately caught the eye.

THEFT ON CONSTRUCTION SITE Unfortunately the construction site had been the subject of a series of thefts, which essentially never stopped. An estimation made showed that the total value of the thefts amounted to the considerable sum of 870,000 USD. Several reports to the local authorities had brought only one result: one day we Italians were all summoned to the police station where they took our fingerprints. The Chief of Police told us that ''thieves don't exist in Yugoslavia, so it must be one of you who steals the materials''.

We had noticed - and photographed - that numbers of shacks buildings used as garages or warehouses had arisen in the vicinity of the construction site and beyond - all made with particular metal sheet that only VOLANI imported from Italy. One morning I arrived at the construction site very early, and I saw a man had loaded into a van some our anodized aluminum sheets - we used it as pillars cladding - I stopped him and asked him outright what he was doing: - Well – he replied – I saw these sheets of metal on the ground and I thought you didn't need them anymore.

Put them back where you found them – I told him

Okay… okay… no problem….

PODGORITZA Every now and then it happened that for work reasons I had to move to Podgoritza. The road first wound along the coast, and then inland, passing through Lake Skadar, the largest in the Balkan peninsula, which Montenegro shares with Albania. For lunch we used to stopp at a restaurant on the lake shore, where they served excellent fried carp. These gigantic fish were the result of cooperation between the then allies Albania and China: the Chinese had introduced millions of carp's fry into the lake, repopulating the waters which risked being left without fish. One morning we were going from Bar to Podgorica – me and a colleague of mine in two different cars. It was late November and very cold. It had rained during the night, and the morning frost had formed a thin film of ice on the road. Suddenly my colleague's car began a series of spins - I was following him closely, but luckily I managed to engage a low gear, and without touching the brakes I stopped on the edge of the road, also scraping the side of the Ritmo FIAT against the mountain rock that flanked the road. The colleague's car stopped in the middle of the road, with its nose facing against the direction of travel. I ran to help him get out of the car, just in time: another car arrived, the driver had lost control and crashed into my colleague's car! We realized that the situation had become very dangerous, and that we had to go to both sides of the road and try to signal the oncoming cars. Luckily the traffic was light at that time and we somehow managed to stop the traffic before anyone else ran into the two damaged cars. Then other drivers who arrived helped us to push the damaged cars towards a nearby dock. Once everything was over, and traffic was restored, the police arrived. First thing they asked me why we had moved the cars.

Because they were in the middle of the road, and represented a danger to other drivers – we replied.

No, said the policeman, you had to wait for our arrival, how can we do the investigations now?

Well, do as you like – my colleague told him.

But since the local police, when they meet a foreigner, always looked for every excuse to steal money, they gave us a report for having ''caused danger with dangerous driving''. And we had to pay immediately, otherwise the cars would be confiscated. So eventually we could leave that nightmare of wind and ice.

LIFE IN FORMER YOUGOSLAVIA IN '80. We stayed in Podgoritza for about two weeks, there was a need for a major overhaul in the work at the local hospital. Our Construction Manager had reached us and brought his family with him. His wife was desperately looking for diapers for her daughter, a rare commodity in Yugoslavia in 1982. Finally one day, through one of our local employees, the lady came into contact with a transporter who made frequent trips abroad and who had availability of otherwise unobtainable diapers. They met at a newsstand, generally in the early hours of the morning, and packs of diapers were wrapped in newspaper, so as not to arouse ''suspicions''. Annother day a colleague who had just returned from Italy told us that he had brought an 8 kilo bag of coffee. Unfortunately the coffee was in grains, therefore someone suggested to go to a small supermarket, where he had seen that there was a machine for grinding coffee near the cash registers. Very bad idea! While my colleague was inside the supermarket grinding the coffee, when by magic - perhaps attracted by word of mouth - dozens of local people showed up asking ''where is the coffee'…we heard that the coffee has arrived…'' The cashier said no that the coffee had not arrived (we learned that it had been missing from the supermarkets for some time) and that it had been brought by an Italian who had just arrived from Italy. But the crowd did not want believe it, and began to shout that it was ''the usual story of making the goods disappear and then selling them on the black market at increased prices''. My colleague, frightened by the crowd, didn't even finish grinding all the coffee and left the shop in a hurry, fearing for his own safety. In the meantime a couple of cars from the ''Milicija'' had arrived and quickly put an end to the uproar.

NOVEMBER 29TH - DAN REPUBLIKE PARTY

November 29th was a special day in the former Yugoslavia. Two important events in their history were celebrated: the second plenary session of the AVNOJ (Anti-fascist Council for People's Liberation of Yugoslavia) in 1943 and the first session of the Yugoslav Constituent Assembly in 1945. Propaganda via radio and TV had begun about ten days before , and it portrayed Germans and Italians as oppressors, occupiers of sacred Yugoslav soil, and responsible for countless war crimes. We had been instructed to keep a low profile, not leave the house or hotel in the evening, and to limit inspections on site as much as possible. Despite this, we suffered various provocations from the local authorities, until the day when a delegation from the Municipality of Bar held a remembrance ceremony inside the complex still under construction, where they had forced us to prepare a classroom complete with carpet and stage for the authorities. And so after having set up the classroom, the mayor gave a speech lasting almost two hours, during which he did nothing but insult Italy and Germany. The sovereignist and nationalist rhetoric still took root in a nation that would soon descend into a war which, as an Italian journalist said during the Yugoslav conflict ''was fought with the ferocity of ancient wars but with the lethal weapons of the era modern''.

A SAD STORY OF AN ITALIAN COLLEAGUE. There was this colleague, Adriano, a young man from Udine, who had been datinga beautiful local girl for some time. Adriano would be returning to Italy for a period of holidays, and was preparing for the return journey with his own car, with which he had reached Montenegro along the entire Adriatic coast. He asked his girlfriend's mother if he could take advantage of this trip to take her with him to Italy. Permission was granted, and on the morning of departure Adriano arrived early at the girl's house. At the honking of the horn the girl looked out from the balcony and urged Adriano to go up into the house. What happened a once the Italian boy entered the apartment it was never really clarified. From what we learned from Adriano it seems that his girlfriend's policeman brother had returned from Belgrade during that night, where he served. And had said he was against his sister's relationship with the Italian guy. The fact is that we were called around 10.00 am from the local emergency room, where Adriano had been admitted in a state of shock and with multiple fractures, especially in his face and upper limbs. A complaint was filed, but the local police, knowing who was involved in the beating, dropped the matter, classifying it as a ''Private Accident''. Adriano returned to Italy after 2 weeks in hospital, with an ambulance sent by VOLANI Rovereto.

WEEKEND's During weekends I always took the opportunity to visit the region around Bar. I have beautiful memories of Dubrovnik, a walled city built by the Venetians modeled on Venice but dry. Very beautiful and evocative is Svety Stefan, the islet connected to the coast where General Tito spent his holidays - Kotor, a picturesque fjord which during World War II was used to hide warships. Cavtat, a fishing town near Dubrovnik, where you could enjoy excellent fish and local wine. I also visited Cetinje, little more than a mountain town, birth placeof ''Jelena Petrović-Njegoš, princess of Montenegro, and then Queen of Italy'' following her marriage to Vittorio Emanuele III, King of Italy. At the time, Montenegro and Croatia showed great potential for tourism development, even if heavily penalized by the socialist system. In essence, the reception was modest, the infrastructure was missing or insufficient. With liberalization - and the arrival of the large international hotel chains - I believe that these shortcomings have been filled.

END of 1982 - ABANDONMENT OF THE PROJECT At the end of 1982, VOLANI decided to abandon the project in Montenegro, given the continuous thefts on the construction site, and the lack of payments by the Yugoslav Government. All Italians returned safely home for Xmas & New Year Holidays. I board a flight of then JAT Yugoslav Airlines, which reached Milan' Linate airport after a stop over in Sarajevo.

VISIT TO BAR IN 1984 In August 1984, on the way to a holiday in Greece, I did made a detour to see what had become of the Bar complex. Arriving near the former construction site, I found a disastrous situation: the project had been abandoned unfinished, the local population had wreaked havoc, stealing and dismantling everything they could. The unkempt grass reached up to the first of the 4 floors of what should have been the new town hall. Broken glass, false ceilings, doors, blown out windows, everything was in a state of abandonment. A disconcerting and somewhat incomprehensible vision. I didn't understand the reason why the local administration hadn't finished the project and taken the buildings into use, given that it was so close to finishing them.

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queerworldtravelers · 5 months ago

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Sutomore, Montenegro

42°08'20" N, 19°02'28" E

Check out the trains and some incredible video editing:

vimeo

With a few weeks left before returning to the Schengen we looked at our options. We could have flown to Istanbul, but Kotor is really far away from a reasonable airport. Albania could have been an option if an entire day on a bus sounded fun. A bus to Sutomore, only a few hours down the coast, sounded like a grand adventure. For the record, bus trips through Montenegro should be on your list of do this once in your life. The buses are hand-me-downs from possibly Germany, the drivers don’t wear seatbelts, and the bus will leave when the driver is done with a smoke break and that might be BEFORE the scheduled time. We hoped to take the ferry from Bar, Montenegro (just down the road from Sutomore) to Bari, Italy and as it turns out one of things Covid erased was this ferry. What is one to do? Enjoy the apocalyptically-empty beach town on the Adriatic for a few weeks before a ridiculous flight adventure back to Sicily. That is exactly what we did! We arrived in Sutomore and wondered if it was an actual ghost town. Thankfully our host picked us up at the bus stop and gave us a ride to the mostly empty Stalinist architecture apartment building with a view of the Adriatic Sea.

We spent many hours watching the Belgrade to Bar Railway cars as they passed on the mountain side several times every day. According to the train expert The Man in Seat 61 the Bar to Belgrade line “is a marvel of engineering, with 254 tunnels and 435 bridges on the 296-mile journey from the Serbian capital to the Adriatic.” We watched carefully and noted that the trains did run every single day and almost exactly on time. Just on the other side of a sizable mountain is the largest lake in Europe: Skadar Lake. On a sunny day wedged between the days filled with the fierce and sustained gusts of katabatic Bora winds we ventured to the train with the goal of checking out Skadar Lake. Accessibility is a hallmark of sustained funding and infrastructure, of which Montenegro has neither. As we waited for the train an elderly woman with two crutches approached us and began pleading in what we deduced to be Bosnian. Frantically, Krystal began typing words into Google translate (which has limited support for Bosnian) and pieced together “men are no good” and “broken feet.” Ah, she needed help getting ON to the train! Mind you, getting “on” the train in Montenegro requires one to adventure across the railroad tracks, up on cement blocks, and the actual train access is similar to climbing a giant metal ladder that is only stationary for two minutes. After a mad dash across the tracks (you never know which track the train will pull up on) we hoisted our new friend up on the train. Mary pulled her arms and Krystal pushed her butt. We got her all the way to a seat and counted our lucky stars that we all made it in one piece.

Skadar Lake is stunning and we recommend adding it to a Balkan adventure should you ever find yourself in this part of the world. It is a haven for migratory birds and you can venture around on a boat, bike, or hike with epic views everywhere you turn. The train is also an absolute must. In fact, fly to Belgrade and take the train to Montenegro destinations.

In August of 2022 Montenegro experienced a vote of no confidence in their Prime Minister. Much like the United States, the country is equally divided between two ideologies. During our time in the country elections were in process for a new Prime Minister and our proximity to Podgorica, the capital, highlighted the intensity. The country was plastered in political ads. There also seemed to be an air of apocalypse. We have noticed that some places revived during Covid and some died. April in Sutomore was dead and each day brought more and more life as summer inched closer.

After a few more bouts of Bora winds we venture to Podgorica on the train. The ride is about an hour from Sutomore and we were excited to spend a little time in the city. Podgorica was fascinating! Spared no lack of bombing in WWII, most of the architecture was constructed after liberation and represents Socialist Yugoslavia. Upon rounding a corner on our way to the river we noted a UN flag flying adjacent to a Russian flag. A little investigation revealed the UN headquarters in Montenegro and their neighbors, Srpska kuća, a Serbian news and radio outlet. A true representation of the two factions in Montenegro.

We ventured about and enjoyed good food and drinks. To round out our adventure Mary eagerly awaited a coffee from her favorite, a vending machine. She pushed the buttons and we waited in anticipation for the vending magic. Lots of gurgles and whirls and then we saw the coffee dispense directly into the waste tray! The machine was out of cups. So sad! A train arrived going in the direction we anticipated was towards home and we boarded. We noticed another train pull up and checked the schedule. North and south bound trains were scheduled to leave within minutes of each other. We had to be on the right one. Then we watched as the other train left the station in the direction of Sutomore! We missed our train, but realized our mistake fast enough to get off of the wrong train before it departed.

Thankfully we only had to wait an hour. When we boarded the next south-bound train it became clear why we had to miss the last one. The train we did catch consisted of Montenegrin compartment cars and they were epic! The seats were like armchairs and we had a whole compartment to ourselves for most of the ride. We opened the window and watched as we passed the Lesendro fortress of 1843 and Skadar Lake.

On our train adventures we met many folks and the most interesting was Jürgen, a surveyor on holiday from Berlin. Jürgen’s main mission is to climb mountains and Sutomore is the perfect place to be if that is one’s mission. We saw him a few times and on our last day, which also happened to be the Serbian Orthodox Easter, we climbed to Crkva Sveta Petka Trnova, a small orthodox church on the top of a hill. He shared with us stories of his time in Ethiopia and Yemen helping survey archeological sites. Later on as it started to rain just a little we met up for a beer, a Nikšičko to be exact and this is a beer we hope to find out in the world someday because it was amazing! Mary ordered a shot of rakia, or fruit brandy, and the owners loved us so much they brought a free round of their home-brewed rakia. Much like the home-brewed limoncello, this stuff is made to help you forget the world around you. We bid good night to our new friend committing to sending postcards to each other from different corners of the world.

The next day we woke before the sun and took a taxi to Podgorica, a flight to Zagreb, a delayed flight to Rome, another flight to Palermo, a train to the city, and walked 40 minutes to get back to our home in the Ballarò.

#Vimeo

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