Just south of Tivat airport, where the bay goes shallow and warm, a low green tongue of land floats a stone’s throw off the shore: Ostrvo Cvijeća, the Island of Flowers, known in the older records as Miholjska Prevlaka. It is tiny — some 300 metres long and 200 wide, tied to the mainland by a strip of sand and a short causeway that can flood at the highest tides — and it smells, genuinely, of flowers: oleander, rosemary, olives and palms crowd its paths. It is also, behind the fragrance, one of the heaviest places in Montenegro: a former seat of bishops, and the scene of the most infamous crime in the bay’s history.
The seat of Zeta
A monastery dedicated to the Archangel Michael — “Miholjska” preserves his name — stood here from early times; tradition traces a church on the islet to the sixth century, with Benedictines here before the Orthodox centuries. Its great moment came in 1219, when St Sava, having won autocephaly for the Serbian Church, organized its dioceses — and placed the seat of the episcopy of Zeta on Prevlaka. For the next two centuries this little island was the spiritual capital of the region that would become Montenegro. By the thirteenth century the monastery complex had spread across the whole islet: a great three-nave cathedral church, cells, cisterns, a scriptorium — a complete monastic city in miniature, ringed by water.
1452: the fish soup
What ended it is remembered on this coast the way other places remember battles. By the mid-fifteenth century Venice was consolidating its grip on the bay, and the powerful Orthodox monastery sat awkwardly in Catholic-administered, Venetian-leaning territory. According to the tradition preserved by the Church — and it should be said plainly that this account comes from tradition and later chronicles, while some modern historians describe the monastery’s end differently, citing its destruction amid a proclaimed plague scare — what happened in 1452 was murder.
On the monastery’s feast day, a merchant from Kotor named Druško came to the celebratory meal as a guest. Into the great pot of fish soup prepared for the brotherhood he introduced arsenic. To avoid suspicion he sat and ate with his hosts, reportedly carrying an antidote powder — which either failed or went untaken, for he did not survive his own crime. As the monks began to collapse, the cry of “plague!” went up, and — the tradition continues — ships’ cannon finished what the poison had begun, reducing the cathedral to rubble. More than seventy monks died; church tradition counts 72. The Orthodox Church venerates them as the Prevlaka Martyrs, and modern examination of remains from the island is reported to have found arsenic — a rare case of chemistry shaking hands with legend across five centuries.
The widow and the rebirth
For nearly four hundred years the island lay in ruins. Its second founder was a woman: Katarina Vlastelinović, a childless widow from Kotor, who sold her property in the city, bought Prevlaka in 1827, and settled there in prayer and solitude. In 1833 she built the small church of the Holy Trinity that still stands, and gathered into it every bone of the martyred monks she could find in the ruins; she willed the island to Petar II Petrović Njegoš before her death in 1847. Around her church, monastic life eventually returned. Today Miholjska Prevlaka is again a living monastery of the Serbian Orthodox Church — you will meet the brotherhood on the paths — with excavated foundations of the medieval cathedral open to the sky, relics of the martyrs honoured in the church, and long-term plans to raise the Archangel Michael’s church again on its old footprint.
What you’ll find
- The ruins of the medieval cathedral complex — walls, foundations and worked stone from the seat of the Zeta bishops.
- The Holy Trinity church of 1833, small, whitewashed and dense with memory.
- The gardens that earned the modern name — the whole islet is effectively a monastery garden by the sea.
- Shallow, warm water on both sides of the causeway, shared with the family beach at Kalardovo.
Visiting
The island is reached on foot from Kalardovo beach, a stage on the Pine promenade walk south of Porto Montenegro: from the beach, the sand-and-causeway link carries you across in two minutes (at exceptional high water it can be awash — time your crossing). There is no entry fee. This is a working monastery, so dress modestly — shoulders and knees covered to enter the church — and keep swimwear for the Kalardovo side of the causeway. Mornings are the quiet, fragrant hours; late afternoon gives the best light on the ruins, with the bay flat and gold behind them. Few places on this coast hold beauty and darkness so close together, and none is easier to walk to.
