Ostrog Monastery & Beyond
Monday 11/23/2009 5:45 PM
A couple of weekends ago (when I was still in the midst of blog posts from Turkey), I rented a car (!) so that Alex and Emile and I could visit Ostrog Monastery and explore some of the more rural areas of Montenegro. Once I found a reasonable deal on a rental with an automatic transmission (I haven't driven a standard in about ten years, and I didn't think the hills of Montenegro would be the best place to test out my hand-foot-eye coordination), driving was tremendous fun. So we picked Emile up in the morning and headed to Ostrog.
I've been hearing since before we left the States that Ostrog was a must-see. It's a Serbian Orthodox monastery built in 1655 and dedicated to Saint Basil of Ostrog, and it's one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations for Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim people in the Balkans. It's built on the side of a mountain just southwest of Niksic, about an hour from Podgorica. Actually, I should say that it's built into the side of the mountain. Unfortunately, I didn't get any photos that accurately show how high(900 meters, according to my travel book) the monastery is up the mountain, but both the church and the monastery are caves rather than free-standing buildings on a ledge of the mountain. Evidently, it isn't uncommon for people to walk from the lower monastery to the upper one, barefoot or on their hands and knees. We decided to drive, though we did see several groups of people walking, and we even picked up one woman who was looking for a ride halfway between the two.
So here is the upper monastery:
We weren't allowed to take photos inside, so we didn't. Unfortunately, the church here didn't look open, so we could only climb a set of stairs up to get to the balcony you see at the top of the building. Here is the section to the left of the section you see in the photo above, where you can buy religious icons, incense (!), and candles to light. When we purchased our goods, we found that our bag also contained a plastic bottle filled with water from the monastery and a vial of some sort of oil ... it doesn't really smell like anything, so I'm thinking it's mineral oil:
A closer look at one of the panels:
And the entrance to the monastery:
Alex and Emile waiting for me to finish taking pictures:
Afterwards, we headed toward Durmitor National Park in northern Montenegro, but we only got to the southern edge of it. Emile had mapped out the way to some great canyons and waterfalls for us to explore between Ostrog and Durmitor, but after a lunch that lasted much longer than any of us would have liked, we found that by the time we got to the area we were interested in exploring, it was already getting too dark for decent pictures. We saw some amazing views, though, and got a good sense of the roads for our next outing. This, for instance is the Bijela River:
Another jigsaw puzzlesque photo, if it was only a little clearer:
One of the less precarious roads we made use of:
The roads, you see, are never marked with names or numbers, and many of them are being built and/or rerouted ... and the few "main roads" between towns are two-laners that wind between cliffs and dropoffs with sporadic guard rails. One cannot be assured that "pink roads," which look more substantial on the maps, are paved. In fact, we found ourselves cheering when we hit pavement after long stretches of dirt and gravel roads. For most of you, think of the most rural driving you've done in the US, and you have a sense of what many of these roads were like. But understand, I'm not complaining a bit. Emile consulted multiple maps and Google Earth print-outs as we drove, comparing the inconsistencies between them with what we actually saw along our route to make the best possible educated guesses about which way to turn at the intersections with signs. That is, after he'd translated the Cyrillic signs (and sometimes hopped out of the car to remove funeral notices covering up the arrows next to town names) to their Latin alphabet equivalent so we could identify the towns they listed. Here, for instance, is one of the more helpful ones we kept returning to:
At the time this photo was taken, by the way, we needed to head left. We traversed this road several times in search of another road leading to a spectacular waterfall. I now refer to this road as "Bull Road" in my mind: the second time we used it, we encountered bulls (or cows with horns) ... as in, they were standing in the 1-1/2 lane road, grazing on the grass along the edge of it. I freaked out a little, suddenly not convinced there was room for both the car and the bovines on the road, and not at all sure whether I should pass them or try to back up or just follow them slowly until they decided to turn off the road. Just as my eyes met the eyes of the one closest to the car, Emile, who was laughing at me, said, "Whatever you do, don't look them in the eye, because that's when they'll charge." Lovely. We made it past them, though, only to find that we had to go back the same way we'd come one more time to get to where we wanted to be.
But our most spectacular encounter with the animal world on this trip (on any roadtrip I've been on so far) was earlier in the day when we might have actually been inside the southern edge of Durmitor. Coming around a curve on a paved, two lane road, a bluff to our left and a drop off to our right, we saw a big brown bear leap off the bluff right in front of the car. Then a slightly smaller bear, then four more, each one smaller than the one before. As soon as they hit the pavement, they looked around for a second or two, then dashed across the road and down the drop off on the other side. A couple of guys traveling in the opposite direction got out of their car with cameras and ran to the side of the road to look down the bluff. Without thinking, Alex and I did the same thing, and eventually Emile followed, though he reminded us that it wasn't a really good idea since we didn't know whether the family had kept on traveling or if they were hanging out just below the road. Luckily, I suppose, we didn't see any sign of them when we got to the edge of the road. All five of us were rather stunned, and we kept exclaiming, "Oh my god! Did you see that? Bears!" The guys from the other car were exclaiming, too, but in what I assume was Montenegrin. I have no idea, of course, what they were saying, but I'm guessing it was generally the same thing.
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