Ulcinj

Ulcinj lies at the extreme southern tip of Montenegro’s coastline, a town whose past extends back nearly twenty-five centuries. Nestled upon a rocky promontory where the azure waters of the Adriatic Sea meet the sands of the Velika Plaža, Ulcinj occupies roughly 255 km² of sun-kissed hinterland and rugged shore. With an urban population numbering 11 488 and a wider municipal community of 21 395, the town today serves as both the administrative heart of Ulcinj Municipality and the cultural anchor of Montenegro’s Albanian population, who constitute some 70 percent of its residents. It stands less than a stone’s throw from the Albanian border and commands views of Lake Šas to the north and the river-forged island of Ada Bojana to the southwest.

One might begin to tell Ulcinj’s story in the millennia before Christ, when Illyrian tribes first established a settlement here. By the fifth century BC, that small outpost had taken on greater shape, its natural harbour inviting to Phoenician, Greek, and later Roman traders. When Rome seized the town in 163 BC, renaming it—according to learned conjecture—Colchinium or Olcinium, it wove Ulcinj into the vast tapestry of the Empire. Roads linked it southward, yet its maritime setting fostered an independence that would endure across the centuries. Despite imperial designs, the settlement preserved a distinctly local character: an intertwining of Illyrian roots with the classical world’s ebb and flow.

With the Roman Empire’s division in the fourth century, Ulcinj passed into the ambit of Byzantium. Although its fortunes rose and fell in tandem with the distant court at Constantinople, the town carved out an identity of its own. For generations, it stood under Byzantine influence, then entered the orbit of medieval Serbian realms. Each overlord left subtle marks on the town’s fabric—walls here, a chapel there—yet Ulcinj retained a cosmopolitan air, a testimony to its maritime culture and the constant passage of peoples and ideas.

The fifteenth century brought a more dramatic transformation. In 1405, Venetian forces wrested control of Ulcinj from its Slavic rulers. Under the ensign of the Serenissima, the town became a Venetian loggia, its stone bastions and narrow lanes echoing with the dialects of Dalmatia, Crete, and the Italian heartland. Yet Venetian rule also attracted darker commerce. Situated along maritime routes that lay beyond the Empire’s watchful galleys, Ulcinj emerged as a haven for corsairs. Ships bearing Ottoman, Moorish, and North African flags frequented its harbour; local captains—privately financed nobles in their own right—preyed upon merchant vessels far beyond the safety of Venice’s convoys. By the mid-sixteenth century, Ulcinj’s name abroad was synonymous with piracy.

That reputation endured even after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Though the Holy League’s fleet shattered the Ottoman naval power in the Ionian Sea, the Ottomans swiftly reasserted themselves ashore. In the same year, aided by North African corsairs, Ottoman forces secured Ulcinj, marking the beginning of a three-century dominion. Under the new regime, the town underwent profound change. The construction of mosques, hammams and a clock tower signaled both spiritual and civic renewal, and within decades, Ulcinj’s population became predominantly Muslim. Its narrow streets filled with the call to prayer, and the lingering echoes of bell-ringing from an earlier era receded into memory.

Occasionally, Ottoman edicts sought to suppress the piratical culture that had once defined Ulcinj. The most decisive blow came under the tenure of Mehmed Pasha Bushati in the late seventeenth century, who moved resolutely to end privateering. Yet the corsairs and their captains had woven piracy into the social fabric; only firm imperial intervention—backed by galleys and fortification—could uproot it. Even so, the memory of those ventures at sea lingered in local lore: tales of moonlit raids, of cargoes seized and ransomed, of hidden inlets along the coast where prizes would be brought under cover of darkness.

Among the more remarkable episodes of Ulcinj’s Ottoman period was the exile of Sabbatai Zevi, the disgraced Jewish mystic who in 1673 proclaimed himself the Messiah. Shipped from Istanbul to this remote Adriatic frontier, Zevi languished until his conversion to Islam under threat of death. His sojourn left a fleeting mark—one of the more curious footnotes in a town whose history already brimmed with dramatic turns.

The final act of Ottoman rule concluded in 1878, when Ulcinj was ceded to the Principality of Montenegro under the Treaty of Berlin. Montenegro, long a mountainous, inland realm, abruptly gained access to the sea. For Ulcinj, the transition meant new rulers, new languages at court, and the gradual reintegration of Orthodox Christian influences. Yet the town’s Islamic monuments—its twenty-six mosques, its Turkish bathhouse—remained integral to its skyline. Even today, Pasha’s Mosque, Sailors’ Mosque and the graceful clock tower of 1754 stand as sentinels to that layered past.

With the disruptions of the twentieth century—two world wars, shifting borders, the rise and fall of Yugoslavia—Ulcinj weathered economic stagnation and depopulation. Yet in the years following Montenegro’s independence in 2006, renewed interest in its coast brought fresh vitality. The New York Times in January 2010 named the region, including Velika Plaža and Ada Bojana, among “The Top 31 Places to Go,” and Ulcinj began to attract a cosmopolitan tide of visitors—families from Serbia, couples from Russia, adventurers from Germany and Italy.

The town now lives by the rhythms of the seasons. From May to September, the beaches fill with laughter and the hum of activity. Velika Plaža, the “Big Beach,” stretches for twelve kilometres of golden sand, interrupted only by the triangular island of Ada Bojana at its southern tip. There, windsurfers and kitesurfers carve up the breezes; naturists find seclusion amid the pines; and campgrounds—once temporary encampments of rafters—have become semi-permanent villages of tents and caravans. It is, in certain lights, a place of abandon: a counterpoint to the well-trod beaches of Dubrovnik or Cannes.

At the other end of the spectrum lies Mala Plaža, the “Small Beach,” tucked into the old town’s embrace. Here, the Korzo promenade awakens each evening as pedestrianized lanes host families and teenagers, strolling beneath lampposts gilded with the warm glow of nostalgia. The cafés spill into the street, their tables occupied until the early hours, and the scent of espresso mingles with the distant salt breeze.

Yet Ulcinj is more than shoreline. Inland, Lake Šas—a shallow lagoon once crossed by the Venetians—has become a haven for birdwatchers, as over two hundred species alight in its reeds each spring and autumn. Nearby, the ruins of Svač (Šas) rise from the marshes, a ghostly testimony to medieval churches once numbering three hundred and sixty-five, according to legend. Those silent stones, half-submerged in tall grasses, evoke a vanished world of Slavic settlers and Ottoman administrators, of plupstat forts and bell towers.

The old town itself is an architectural palimpsest. Perched atop a rocky bluff, its narrow alleys wind among houses that bear the imprints of Illyrian foundations, Roman arcades, Venetian balconies and Ottoman eaves. Restoration efforts—ongoing for more than a decade—have replaced asphalt with cobblestone sett, updated water-mains and electrical systems, yet the district retains its lived-in charm. Çarshia, the central bazaar neighbourhood, hosts two mosques—Namazgjahu and Kryepazari—where the faithful still gather in prayer. Around them, two hundred shops peddle everything from locally woven carpets to spices imported from Istanbul.

Religion in Ulcinj is a quiet coexistence. Mosques stand alongside churches; in the spring, Easter processions wind down the same lanes that host Ramadan iftars. The most conspicuous Christian landmark is St Nicholas’ Church, its Baroque façade an echo of Venetian days. Inside, one may find iconography reflecting both Orthodox and Latin rites. And on the salt-panned flats to the east, flamingos now roost where once brine was harvested—nature reclaiming industry, as if making art of Ulcinj’s ever-shifting fortunes.

The linguistic tapestry of Ulcinj mirrors its heritage. To walk its streets is to hear Albanian, Montenegrin, Italian, German and, among younger residents, English. Older generations recall a time when Russian was spoken in the summer, when Yugoslav songs drifted from radios in cafés that catered to itinerant workers. Today’s travellers, too, add new accents to the medley. A bus from Podgorica or Tivat disgorges families from central Europe; during the high season, FlixBus coaches link the town to Tirana and Shkodër across the border. Yet despite the influx, Ulcinj retains a sense of intimacy—its streets are compact, steep in places, navigable by foot if one minds the occasions of slick pavement or narrow sidewalks.

Adventure lingers just beyond the municipal boundary. To the east, the winding roads toward Lake Skadar climb toward mountain passes where one may stand astride Montenegro and Albania, gazing in both directions at freshwater marshes and ancient hamlets. Hitchhikers along these roads speak of rare buses and generous drivers; of the villages of Arbëreshë and the slow-moving rhythms of pastoral life. To the west, the Adriatic Highway threads northward past Bar and Budva, yet alongside it lie secret coves reachable only by footpaths or local minibuses.

Despite its growing renown, Ulcinj remains—at its core—a place shaped by human currents more than by touristic tides. Its streets are not merely promenades but corridors of memory, where every stone seems to speak of a past migration, a negotiated surrender, an annexed flag. Its architecture is not a museum but a living organism, evolving as it has for two and a half millennia. Even its beaches feel provisional: dunes that shift under daily winds, sands that are reclaimed by the rising tide, plantations of tamarisk that will uproot themselves and march northward.

In the throttle of modernity, one might anticipate that such a town would be consumed by resorts and hotels. And yet the old town resists the wholesale transformation that has felled so many coastal settlements. Here, restoration has adhered to original plans; new construction has been limited to peripheral areas, leaving the medieval core intact. Ada Bojana remains a delta island, unditched and untilled, its triangular shape dictated by the Bojana River’s silty slowings—not by speculators’ blueprints. Velika Plaža has no high-rise hotels; instead, low-rise bungalows peer through pine groves, their wooden shutters painted in Mediterranean pastels.

Perhaps this is Ulcinj’s central lesson: that a place may welcome change without surrendering its essence. The currents of history have swept in armies and empires, traders and pirates, exiles and pilgrims. They have left monuments in stone and mortar—walls here, a minaret there—and they have left more ephemeral traces, in language, custom and collective memory. Yet the town’s soul remains lodged in its geography: in the blunt headland that defends the harbour, in the slow bend of the river delta, in the narrow mouths of stream-flooded ravines. It is a place shaped as much by topography as by time.

For the visitor who seeks only sun and sand, Ulcinj delivers with abundance. For the traveller who seeks history’s human contours, it offers far more: an unbroken string of stories, each linked to the next by the shifting tides. The Roman senator who glimpsed its harbour; the Venetian corsair who hid his prize there; the Ottoman pasha who stamped out piracy; the Jewish mystic exiled to its alleys—all are part of a single narrative, one that continues to unfold. To walk Ulcinj’s streets is to inhabit that narrative for a moment, to become a minor character in a drama that began when Rome was yet a republic and that will endure as long as the sea laps upon its shores.

In the final reckoning, Ulcinj stands as both a border town and a meeting place: a frontier at the edge of Montenegro and Albania, a crossroads where East meets West, where empires have collided and converged. It is a reminder that geography and history are inseparable, that the contours of land shape the contours of human destiny, and that in the slow accretion of time, every stone and every street may yet bear witness to the enduring capacity of place to inspire wonder, to host conflict, and ultimately, to endure.