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| Bay of Kotor circled in blue |
The beauty and wonders seem so intensely packed along this stretch of the Dalmatian coast. Yes I have wondered about the name too! It stems from an Illyrian tribe called the Dalmatae. According to Prof Bertrand, the Illyrians were a group of Indo-European-speaking peoples who inhabited this region in ancient times – C8BC - C5AD. Later the now-extinct Dalmatian language emerged only to be replaced later by Venetian – geopolitics abound!
Montenegro! Such a romantic name. It derives from the Serbian ‘Crna Gora’, meaning ‘Black Mountain’ because of the appearance of Mount Lovćen which was covered in dense evergreen forests.
This morning we spent a few heavenly hours navigating around the deep fjord-like Bay of Kotor which is jaw-droppingly (maybe a new word?!) beautiful. Almost everyone was on deck as we slid quietly sand slowly towards the medieval city of Kotor.
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| ‘Camouflaged mooring’ for vessels of the old Yugoslav Navy |
We saw this tunnel entrance along the waterline as we were leaving the Bay of Kotor - not entirely by chance as I was looking for something fitting this description. I had very little idea where it might be, but this is the entrance to one of the ‘camouflaged mooring’ tunnels for attack vessels of the now defunct Yugoslav Navy. At the entrance to this, and other tunnels in the Bay of Kotor, metal arms topped with rock-like chunks of polystyrene were designed to swing across the entrance, transforming the facility into what looked like a rocky bay when viewed from the air.
All too soon we were out in the Adriatic heading for Dubrovnik.
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