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Bar · Under Rumija, four kilometres inland

Stari Bar: The Town Killed by Its Own Water

Four and a half hectares of walled town with two hundred and forty buildings in it — taken in 1878 by blowing up the aqueduct, and empty ever since.

Reading time ~9 min5 source-linked referencesInterpretive phase drawing, not a survey42.0906° N · 19.1361° E

How to read this article

Archaeologists record a building as a phase plan: every construction period gets its own colour, and the building is drawn as the sum of its phases. That convention is the colour system of this whole page. Wherever you see one of these colours — in the drawing, the timeline, the annotations, the rule beside a paragraph — it tells you who built that.

  • Early occupationto 1443
  • Venetian1443–1571
  • Ottoman1571–1878
  • Montenegrin1878–today

Who held it, drawn to scale · 703 years

to 1today

Nine hundred years of occupation and then a hundred and fifty of nothing. Stari Bar is the only place in this series where the fortification outlived the town inside it.

The phase drawing

A town, then no town

Stari Bar is drawn in plan, because what is remarkable is not one building but a whole urban circuit — walls climbing a hillside around some two hundred and forty structures, with the thing that killed it running in from outside. Scroll to build it up.

Interpretive phase plan of Stari BarA plan of the walled town climbing its hillside: the circuit with the citadel at the top, Venetian buildings inside it, the dense Ottoman town of some two hundred and forty structures with a minaret among them, the aqueduct running in from outside the walls, an explosion marked on that aqueduct for 5 January 1878, a dotted line of departure for the surrender four days later, and the whole circuit finally hatched and broken because nobody has lived inside it since.

The circuit, climbing to the citadel at the top.

Early

A circuit climbing to a citadel

The walls run around a slope and up it, to a fortress at the summit. The site is layered from antiquity onwards and is described as the largest and most important medieval archaeological site in the Balkans — four and a half hectares of it.

1443–1571 · Venetian

Venice comes back

The Venetians returned in 1443 and held Bar for well over a century, until 1571. Their building is inside the walls, in a town that was already old when they arrived.

1571–1878 · Ottoman

Two hundred and forty buildings

Under the Ottomans the town reached its full extent: at its peak the walls enclosed around 240 structures — houses, churches, mosques, palaces, bathhouses, shops. Water came in from outside on an aqueduct, which still stands.

5 January 1878

225 kilograms inside the aqueduct

Montenegrin forces besieged and bombarded the town. Then they placed 225 kg of explosive inside the Bar aqueduct and detonated it, cutting off the water supply. Nothing about the walls mattered after that.

9 January 1878

Four days later

Ibrahim Bey surrendered the town on 9 January. Much of the population, by then predominantly Albanian and Turkish, fled or was expelled; the town was looted and largely abandoned.

Since

Nobody has lived here in a century and a half

Unlike Kotor, Budva or Herceg Novi, the old town of Bar was never reoccupied. A new Bar grew up on the coast four kilometres away and the walled town was left. What survives is a whole city plan, standing to waist height, with grass in it.

The story

Not a fort with a town — a town that was a fort

Everything else in this series is a building. Stari Bar is a city: four and a half hectares of walled town on a hillside, with the circuit running up to a fortress at the summit, and at its peak some two hundred and forty structures inside it — houses, churches, mosques, palaces, bathhouses, shops.

It sits four kilometres inland under Rumija, which tells you it was never about the sea. The Venetians returned in 1443 and held it until 1571, when the Ottomans took it; the town then spent three centuries as an Ottoman provincial centre and reached its greatest extent.

Water came in from outside, along an aqueduct. A sixteenth-century Ottoman aqueduct still stands just beyond the walls. Remember it.

The ruins of Stari Bar: roofless stone walls and empty buildings spread over a hillside inside the old fortifications, with a flag flying above them and the mountains of Rumija rising behind.
  • Roofless, all of it. Not one building in the walled town has a roof. Around 240 structures stood here at the peak — houses, churches, mosques, palaces, bathhouses, shops — and every one of them is open to the sky.
  • The slope. The town climbs. The circuit runs around a hillside and up it to a fortress at the summit, which is why the ruins are stacked in terraces rather than laid out flat.
  • Standing to waist height. What survives is mostly the lower courses — enough to read the street plan of a whole medieval and Ottoman town, which is precisely why the site matters archaeologically.
  • The flag over an empty town. Nobody has lived inside these walls for over a century. The flag is the only thing here that is maintained.
  • Rumija behind. The mountain the town sat under, four kilometres inland from the sea. Old Bar was never a port; the harbour town on the coast is a separate, much later place.
The ruins of Stari Bar, with a flag over the empty town. Photograph by Dudva, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Select a marker to read the annotation.

January 1878

Four days, and a water supply

In 1878, during the Montenegrin war of independence, Montenegrin forces besieged and bombarded Bar. The walls held. What did not hold was the water.

On 5 January 1878 the besiegers detonated 225 kilograms of explosive inside the Bar aqueduct, cutting off the town's supply. Ibrahim Bey surrendered on 9 January. The siege of a town that had stood for the better part of a thousand years was decided in four days by an engineering problem outside its walls.

After the surrender much of the population — by then predominantly Albanian and Turkish — fled or was expelled. The town was looted and largely abandoned. That is the end of the story: not a battle, but a departure.

Since 1878

The one that was never reoccupied

Kotor was rebuilt. Budva was rebuilt. Herceg Novi was repaired. Nobody has lived inside the walls of Stari Bar for over a hundred years.

A new Bar grew up on the coast four kilometres away and became the country's main port, and the old town was simply left where it was. The result is the thing that makes the site extraordinary: an entire fortified town, of every period from antiquity to the nineteenth century, with nothing built on top of it since.

There is one more detail worth knowing, and it connects Stari Bar to almost every other article in this series. The Montenegro earthquake of 15 April 1979 — the shock that destroyed the Citadela at Herceg Novi, cracked Kanli Kula, damaged Kotor into a UNESCO danger listing and levelled the walls of Budva — had its epicentre about six kilometres east of here. The place that had already been abandoned for a century was the place the whole thing started.

to 1 → today

The full timeline

Dated events only. Where sources disagree, the conflict is stated in the entry rather than resolved silently.

siege or conquestbuilding workeverything else

Early occupation

to 1443

  • antiquity onward

    A layered site

    Fortifications, palaces, religious buildings and infrastructure from antiquity to the 19th century, over 4.5 hectares.

Venetian

1443–1571

  • 1443

    The Venetians return

    They hold Bar for the next 128 years.

Ottoman

1571–1878

  • 1571

    The Ottomans take the town

  • 16th c.

    The aqueduct

    An Ottoman aqueduct brings water in from outside the walls. It still stands.

  • peak

    About 240 structures inside the walls

    Houses, churches, mosques, palaces, bathhouses, shops and public buildings, packed inside a circuit climbing to a fortress at the summit.

Montenegrin

1878–today

  • 5 Jan 1878

    The aqueduct is blown up

    Montenegrin forces detonate 225 kg of explosive inside it, cutting off the town's water.

  • 9 Jan 1878

    Ibrahim Bey surrenders

    Four days later. The population, predominantly Albanian and Turkish, flees or is expelled; the town is looted.

  • since

    Never reoccupied

    A new Bar grows on the coast. Nobody has lived inside the old walls for over a century.

  • 15 Apr 1979

    The earthquake starts here

    The epicentre of the Montenegro earthquake lay about 6 km east of Stari Bar.

Corrections

What the internet gets wrong

These claims circulate widely online and do not survive checking. If you have read about Stari Bar elsewhere, you have probably met at least one of them.

Two Bars

Stari Bar is not the port.

The walled town is four kilometres inland under Rumija and has been empty since 1878. The modern city and Montenegro's main port is a separate place on the coast.

Attribute

“The largest medieval site in the Balkans.”

Widely stated and plausible given the 4.5 hectares, but it is a claim rather than an established ranking. Cite it as the claim it is.

Widely missed

The siege was won on the water, not the walls.

The decisive act of January 1878 was destroying the aqueduct outside the town, not breaching the fortifications. The surrender came four days later.

Sources and image record

Dates and interpretations are tied to the archive and research sources below. Where they conflict, the conflict is named in the text rather than smoothed over.

Bar Then and Now
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