Ljuta

Ljuta is the northern end of Dobrota, the seven-kilometre ribbon of captains’ houses that runs up the east shore of the inner Bay of Kotor from the old town, and it is named for the river that marks the boundary: a karst spring that bursts from the foot of the mountain and runs about two hundred metres to the sea at seven degrees, quietly in summer and, after heavy rain, with the fierce rush that gave it the name — ljuta, angry. The old flour mills that stood on it are now the Stari Mlini restaurant, family-run for over forty years and reachable by boat; the river mouth beside it is the coldest swim in the bay. Ljuta is not a census settlement of its own — MONSTAT counts it inside Dobrota’s 8,056 — and a local count in 2019 put its permanent residents at about 120, with three times as many people owning houses and holiday flats here. The village is a single row of stone houses along the shore street, the captains’ mansions of the Ivanović, Tripković, Dabinović and Milošević families among them, and in its middle, on a raised walled plateau by the water, stands the Baroque church of St Peter: begun around 1700 and finished in 1780, built of dressed stone the village’s seafarers shipped from Korčula, modelled on Our Lady of the Rocks at Perast, with three marble altars painted in Venice and a silver-clad Madonna the village has venerated since a vow made in the cholera year of 1855. The street is called Ulica 7. Novembra for the morning in 1944 when German troops landed here, lined up thirty civilians in front of the church, were talked out of the execution by the priest — “shoot me, not them” — and burned 34 of the village’s 41 houses. Five families came back and rebuilt. Today Ljuta is a place to stay rather than to tour: a few self-catering apartments, three small shops, a concrete bathing platform, the Blue line bus at the door, and the whole inner bay within a quarter of an hour — Orahovac 2 km north, Perast 7, Kotor’s old town 7 the other way, Tivat airport 15. The road north from the village towards Perast is the most open stretch of the whole shore.