Between Igalo and the old town of Herceg Novi lies Topla, a leafy residential quarter that gives little outward sign of its extraordinary literary pedigree. Yet within a few hundred metres of each other here stand two modest buildings that connect the two greatest names in South Slavic letters: the church school where Petar II Petrović Njegoš, Montenegro's poet-prince, received his first real education, and the house — the only one he ever built — where the Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić spent what he considered the happiest years of his life. No other neighbourhood on the coast can claim as much literature per square metre.
The school by the two churches
The heart of old Topla is a walled churchyard holding two small Orthodox churches: Saint George, dating from 1688, and the church of the Ascension, built in 1713 and renovated in 1864. Around these churches grew one of the oldest schools on the coast — parish account books show a school operating here even before 1788. Its great era began in 1813, when the hieromonk Josif Tropović, the parish priest of Topla, renewed the school — by a neat coincidence, the very year that its most famous future pupil was born in the mountain village of Njeguši.
The making of Njegoš
In the mid-1820s, Petar I Petrović, the ruling prince-bishop of Montenegro — later canonised as Saint Petar of Cetinje — sent his young nephew and chosen heir, Rade Tomov Petrović, down from the mountains to be educated. After time at the monasteries of Cetinje and nearby Savina, the boy spent around eighteen months at Tropović's school in Topla, where he acquired the foundations of Italian, mathematics, Church Slavonic and church singing. He was, by the testimony of his schoolmate Petar Dostinić, the best of them: he “learned better than all the other students, and there were over twenty of them”, and Tropović, who liked the boy's quick wit, chose him as his regular companion on parish errands. That mountain boy became Petar II Petrović Njegoš — ruler of Montenegro, and author of The Mountain Wreath (1847), the epic that stands at the summit of South Slavic poetry. The schools Njegoš himself later founded in Cetinje and Dobrsko Selo were, in all likelihood, modelled on the little school at Topla where he had learned his letters. The street running through the quarter bears his name to this day — which gives the neighbourhood's second literary story its address.
The house Andrić built
Ivo Andrić won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961 for a body of work — The Bridge on the Drina above all — that made him Yugoslavia's most celebrated writer. He was famously a man of rented rooms and hotel desks who had never owned a home; and when, past seventy, he finally decided to build one, he chose Topla. Construction began in 1962 on Njegoševa street, to a design by the Belgrade painter and architect Vojislav Đokić, financed in part with the writer's Nobel Prize money. The choice was made largely for love: Andrić's wife, the theatre costume designer Milica Babić, suffered from arthritis, and the mild climate, the sun and the therapeutic mud of neighbouring Igalo promised her relief.
From 1963 to 1968 the couple lived here, and Andrić later spoke of those Herceg Novi years as the happiest of his life — morning walks to the sea, a garden, the unhurried rhythm of the bay. It ended abruptly: Milica died in 1968, and the widowed Andrić could not bear the house without her. He effectively never lived in it again. The house passed through decades of quiet neglect before being restored and opened to the public in April 2021 — timed to the sixtieth anniversary of his Nobel Prize — as a memorial museum with a permanent exhibition on the writer's life and his Herceg Novi years. It remains what it always was: the only house that Ivo Andrić ever built.
A quarter worth lingering in
Topla rewards slow walking. The twin churches in their walled yard, the plaque marking the school, the writer's house on Njegoševa street and the lanes of old stone villas between them can be seen in an unhurried hour, and the contrast they frame is moving: a barefoot mountain boy learning to read in 1825, and Europe's most honoured novelist choosing the same few streets for his one attempt at a home.
Visiting
Topla lies directly above the Pet Danica promenade, roughly midway between Igalo and Herceg Novi's old town — from the shoreline path, any of the lanes climbing inland brings you to Njegoševa street within five minutes on foot. The churchyard with the churches of Saint George and the Ascension is free to enter when open; the Andrić house museum charges a modest fee and keeps seasonal hours, so check locally before making a special trip. Mornings are best, when the lanes are cool — then drop back down to the promenade and continue towards the old town for coffee, as Andrić himself liked to do.
