The Montenegrin village was built from what was at hand: stone, water and communal labour. In the karst, building was done without mortar; in the north, people defended themselves with towers; in summer they moved to katuns; and grain was ground in watermills. Much of this can still be seen today, from Njeguši and Luštica to Plav and Komovi, if you know where to look.
How the Montenegrin village was built, what a gumno, a kula, a katun and a moba are, and where you can still see them today.
The stone house
In the karst of Old Montenegro wood was expensive and stone was everywhere. So the traditional house of the Katunska nahija was built of dressed or broken limestone: rectangular, with thick walls and small windows. On the ground floor is the konoba, where wine, cheese, pršut and tools are kept, and above it life centres on the hearth. Njegoš's birth house in Erakovići, Njeguši, where Njegoš was born in 1813, is just such a house. Bishop Petar I renovated it and divided it into three parts for three brothers, and it has been a memorial museum since 1973.
The hamlets of the Njeguši clans ring the fertile Njeguško polje, with houses set along its edges and on the slopes so as not to take a single strip of farmland. Above Lake Skadar the Crmnica village of Godinje was built house against house and house above house, its konobas linked by passages, and locals say you could once cross the whole village without stepping into the street. Durmitor is different: a stone ground floor with a log house above it and a steep shingle roof, because snow lies there for months.
Dry-stone walls, threshing floors and cisterns
The village's greatest work is not its houses but kilometres of walls built without mortar. A suvomeđa is stacked from stone taken out of the field itself, so the same work cleared the land and raised a boundary or terrace. Nowhere is this clearer than on Luštica, where kilometres of walls record centuries of olive growing.
A gumno is a round platform paved and walled with stone, where grain was threshed. It was also the village square: people sat there, danced the kolo and settled village matters. Gornja Lastva above Tivat, a village of about a hundred houses in the first half of the 20th century, had 12 threshing floors, seven olive mills and 24 wells. In the karst rainwater was collected in ublovi and bistijerne, stone cisterns, and the village of Ubli, the centre of the Kuči clan, takes its name from the ubao.
Watermills and crafts
Where there was running water, there were mills. A stream watermill grinds corn and wheat with the force of a brook, and beside it there was often a stupa, a fulling mill where woollen cloth was beaten until it became dense. In Fundina in Kuči, where 76 springs rise within about two square kilometres, more than 30 watermills once worked. Near Pljevlja, the Ćirović Ethno Watermill keeps a hundred-year-old stream mill that has never stopped turning.
The village made almost everything it needed: stonemasons built houses, thresholds and troughs, craftsmen split shingles, and women spun, wove and embroidered. On the Bihor kilim, from the Petnjica area, blood brotherhoods were sworn and marriages arranged, and the mosque in Petnjica keeps a collection of more than 500 kilims. With the gusle, whose single string is made of about thirty horsehairs, the guslar accompanies his own heroic songs.
Did you know?
When the carved entrance door was stolen from Redžepagić Tower in Plav during the Balkan Wars, Šaban-beg swore he would never enter through that entrance again. He walled up the old entrance on the north side and opened a new one on the south.
Towers: when a house had to be a fortress
Where danger was constant, the house grew upwards. A kula is a fortified house with thick stone walls and gun slits on every side. The oldest in the Plav-Gusinje area is the Redžepagić Tower in Plav, dated to 1671 by the Plav Tourist Organisation. Its walls are more than a metre thick, and its trademark is a wooden top storey with covered balconies above the gun slits, called ćošak. When an attack came, the livestock were brought into the ground floor and the family defended from above. The tower has been a museum since 1979.
Towers are not only a northern story. In Njeguši the Petrović tower stands beside Njegoš's birth house, and at Medun in Kuči, below the remains of Illyrian Meteon, the duke and writer Marko Miljanov (1833–1901) was born; a museum there is dedicated to him.
Moba, sijelo and sabor
The hardest jobs were never done alone. Moba is voluntary shared work: neighbours come to help with mowing, harvest, threshing or building a house, the host lays the table, and the help is returned when someone else needs it. In summer families moved with their herds to the katuns, summer settlements on the high pastures, and winter evenings belonged to the sijelo and prelo around a single hearth.
The sabor was, and still is, the biggest gathering. At the Church of St Elijah at Kučka korita the clans met to decide important matters, and the great mountain gathering is still held every St Peter's Day, 12 July, on Mount Ljuban near Andrijevica, drawing several thousand people. None of this is just a museum display: pršut is still smoked in Njeguši, dry-stone walls are being restored on Luštica, and in Gornja Lastva the kolo is danced at the Lastva Fešta on the first Saturday of August.
