Ask anyone in Herceg Novi where to walk and the answer is automatic: the šetalište, the seafront promenade that runs unbroken along the shore from Igalo to Meljine. Its official name, Šetalište Pet Danica — the Promenade of the Five Danicas — is used every day by thousands of people, and yet remarkably few visitors ever ask the obvious question: who were the five Danicas? The answer is one of the most affecting stories on this coast — five young women from the villages around the bay, all bearing the same luminous name, none of whom lived to see the sea path named in their honour.
First, the path itself
The promenade exists because a railway died. In 1901 Austria-Hungary opened a narrow-gauge line from Sarajevo to a terminus on the shore at Zelenika, and its final kilometres ran right along the water's edge past Herceg Novi — the stretch that gave the coast its first tourists. When the little train, remembered fondly as Ćiro, made its last run in the late 1960s, the town inherited a perfectly graded, sea-level corridor along its entire shoreline. Rails were lifted, paving was laid, and the trackbed became what it is today: roughly seven kilometres of continuous seaside walkway linking Igalo, Topla, the old town's harbour at Škver, and Meljine, complete with a former railway tunnel — where local legend insists that a wish made while running its length on a single breath will come true.
Five girls named for the morning star
Danica is an old folk name meaning the morning star — Venus at dawn — and in the early twentieth century it was common in the villages above the bay. When the Second World War reached Yugoslavia in 1941, the Boka's youth joined the partisan resistance in extraordinary numbers, girls alongside boys. Among the fighters from the Herceg Novi area were five village girls who shared the name, most of them serving in the ranks of the Fifth Montenegrin Proletarian Brigade:
- Danica Bojanić, born 1922 in Dragalj, in the Krivošije highlands above Risan. She was killed in 1942 at the village of Popi, in the valley of the Sutjeska river.
- Danica Đurović, born 1922 in Žlijebi, the stone village on the slopes high above Herceg Novi. She served a mortar crew, and did not return from an assault in April 1943.
- Danica Kosić, born 1922, who like the others left the bay as a teenager and did not come back from the war.
- Danica Tomašević, born 1925 in Svrčuge, a platoon delegate and machine-gunner of the Fifth Montenegrin Proletarian Brigade. She was killed on 13 June 1943 at Sutjeska, aged eighteen.
- Danica Popivoda, born 1924 in Bijela on the bay's northern shore, who rose to command in the Lovćen battalion and fell in 1944 at Lipa in the Čevo region, aged twenty.
Sutjeska, 1943
The date of Danica Tomašević's death places her at the centre of the Yugoslav war's most terrible episode. In May and June 1943, Axis forces encircled the main partisan force in the mountains around the Sutjeska river canyon, in what the Germans called Operation Schwarz. The breakout succeeded, but at a staggering price — roughly a third of the surrounded fighters died — and 13 June 1943, the day the eighteen-year-old machine-gunner from Svrčuge was killed, was the blackest day of the breakthrough, the same day the legendary commander Sava Kovačević fell leading his division against the encirclement. A Yugoslav magazine later described the Boka's young women at Sutjeska as a bouquet of eighteen-year-old girls that withered in the epic — sentimental language, perhaps, but the ages on the casualty lists justify it. The five Danicas died between 1942 and 1944, none older than her early twenties.
A name instead of a monument
In the 1970s, when Herceg Novi's seaside walkway was formally arranged and named, the town chose to dedicate it to the five Danicas — a memorial you walk rather than one you look at. It was a characteristically Yugoslav gesture, but it has outlived the state that made it: the ideology has faded, the name has not, and there is something quietly right about it. The promenade is the town's democratic space — pensioners, toddlers, swimmers, tourists, fishermen — and it belongs, in name, to five village girls who were denied the ordinary long lives being lived along it every single evening.
Visiting
The promenade needs no ticket and no timetable — it is simply there, free, day and night, along the whole shoreline of the town. A good way to take it in is to start at the western end by the Igalo Institute on the Pet Danica promenade and walk east with the sea on your right, through Topla and beneath the old town to Škver, continuing as far as Meljine if your legs agree — about seven flat kilometres end to end, with cafés and bathing spots the entire way. Early morning and the hour before sunset are the promenade's best moods. As you walk, remember whose name you are walking on: Bojanić, Đurović, Kosić, Tomašević, Popivoda — five morning stars from the villages above the bay.
