by Flavia Brilli
'What country, friends, is this?'
'Twelfth Night', Shakespeare.
In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night Viola, the heroine of the play, finds herself shipwrecked on a strange coast. "What country, friends, is this?" she asks. That country was Illyria: an ancient region of the Western Balkans whose coast along with Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, included the tiny pearl of the Adriatic coast, Boka Kotorska, also known as Kotor Bay. And, like Viola, when I first set my eyes on Boka's beauty, on the ferry crossing from Lepetane to Kamenari, I too felt a sense of awe and strangeness: with its brooding Wagnerian karst mountains plunging into the bay like ancient mammoths of prehistory, and Perast's ancient, island churches floating on the sea like stone maidens.
For something magical occurs when the mountains meet the sea: that spellbinding combination of the sea's eternally shape shifting character, set against the stone force of a mountain's unyielding, fixed endurance, inevitably creates a captivating tension. Two opposing forces with two opposing voices: one which stands for stubborn, immutability; the other, for tempestuous, unpredictability.
And it is these landscapes which attract me the most: since with opposites there is always drama and change. Throughout the summer, the bay is a glittering benign jewel. In autumn, as the weather changes, the sea breezes and mountain air mix together bringing their own strange dramas: wild winds, theatrical sunsets and torrents of rain; a Wagnerian drama all wild, grand and beautiful.
For Boka Kotorska is not simply a playground for idle tourists and relaxing locals: it's a geological wonder with its own internal dramas. Look to the skies and to the mountain tops; or the sea, when it's in a belligerent mood, to really know and love Boka. Find a rock to just sit and watch from. Watch the people at the shoreline; the fishermen in their boats; watch the mini dramas unfurl in the skies above.
And, then, when you are done with the sea, climb to the top of Lovcen and look down from its majestic heights across the breathtaking beauty of Montenegro's mountainous landscape, and think of the English writer George Bernard Shaw who wondered " am I in paradise or on the moon?"
