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Herceg Novi · On the shore, below the Old Town

Citadela: The Fortress That Is Not There

It closed the southern end of the defences for centuries, nobody is sure when it was built, and in ninety seconds in 1979 it went into the sea.

Reading time ~7 min6 source-linked referencesInterpretive phase drawing, not a survey42.4525° N · 18.5368° 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.

  • Uncertain origin15th c.?–1482
  • Ottoman1482–1687
  • Venetian1687–1797
  • Austria · Russia · France1797–1814
  • Austro-Hungarian1814–1918
  • Yugoslav & Montenegrin1918–today

Who held it, drawn to scale · 604 years

15thtoday

The first slice is drawn faint and dashed because nobody has firmly dated it. Herceg Novi’s heritage literature says only that the time of origin has not been reliably established, and that a fifteenth-century date can be presumed.

The phase drawing

Draw what is gone

Every other article here is drawn from a building you can walk around. This one is drawn from a survey, a municipal inventory and a heap of stone in the water. Scroll to build it up — and then watch it go.

Interpretive phase section through the Citadela at the waterlineA cut through the fortification on its promontory eight metres above the sea: an older core of uncertain date drawn as a dashed outline, the Venetian crescent with gun embrasures facing the water and a cistern below, the wall and bridge that tied it to the Lower Town, the 1979 earthquake drawn as a crack and a dashed collapse line, and finally one consolidated stretch of western wall standing over rubble in the sea.

An older core, drawn dashed — the date has never been established.

15th century?

A core nobody has dated

The heritage literature is honest about this: the time of origin has not been reliably established. A fifteenth-century date can be presumed, possibly in the era of Herceg Stjepan Vukčić Kosača. It is drawn dashed here because that is exactly how firmly it is known.

Late 17th c. · Venetian

The crescent, with its guns on the water

Under Venice the fortification took the form it kept: semi-circular to polygonal, eight metres above the sea at the southern edge of the medieval defensive system, with gun positions facing the water, a cistern and a guard post. With Forte Mare it made a single defensive system — one fort above the entrance, one on the water.

1702 · The link

Tied to the Lower Town

A fortified wall ran from the Citadela to the Lower Town, carried over what is now the Šetalište pet Danica promenade on a stone bridge. The southernmost point of the defences was no longer isolated.

15 April 1979

The younger walls go over completely

The Montenegro earthquake did not damage the Citadela. It ended it. The heritage account is blunt: after the earthquake, complete overturning of the younger walls occurred. Of the whole fortress system this is the one that did not survive.

Today

One consolidated wall, and the rest in the sea

It was never rebuilt. A conservation workshop in 2017 consolidated the western wall, cleared vegetation and repaired the walkways — stabilisation, not reconstruction. Everything else is stone on the shoreline and under the water.

The story

The one that did not survive

Five fortifications ring Herceg Novi and four of them are still standing. This is the fifth. The Citadela closed the southern end of the medieval defensive system, on the shore below the Old Town, eight metres above the water, and on 15 April 1979 it stopped existing.

It went by three names. Citadela is the modern one. In the older records it is Macel, and it is also Mezzaluna — the crescent — which describes the shape: semi-circular to polygonal, with gun positions looking straight out at the water, a cistern inside and a guard post.

Its job was to complete Forte Mare. One fort stood above the entrance to the bay; this one sat on the water at the southern tip of the promontory. Herceg Novi’s heritage literature says that under Venetian rule, at the end of the seventeenth century, the two of them made a single defensive system. Neither was designed to work alone.

Watercolour of the Citadela before its destruction: an ochre stone fortification standing at the water's edge with arched gun openings in its seaward face and a small red-roofed turret, a stone arched bridge and a flight of steps climbing to it from the left, rocks in the foreground and the mountains of the Bay of Kotor behind.
  • The guns, facing the water. The arched openings in the seaward face. The heritage surveys describe the Citadela as semi-circular to polygonal with gun positions onto the sea — this is the only picture in the series that shows them in a standing building.
  • Where the wall met the sea. The municipal inventory puts it plainly: its southern walls were in the sea. The fortification sat about eight metres above the water at the southern tip of the medieval defensive system.
  • The bridge and the stair. The arch on the left, with steps climbing past it. A fortified wall ran from here to the Lower Town, carried over what is now the Šetalište pet Danica promenade on a stone bridge.
  • The turret. The small tower with the red roof, above the main mass. No source available here dates it, so it carries the neutral colour rather than a phase — the painting records it, the record does not explain it.
  • None of this is there. On 15 April 1979 the younger walls of the Citadela overturned completely. Everything in this picture above the rock line is gone. What remains is one consolidated stretch of wall and a scatter of stone in the water.
The Citadela as it stood, in a watercolour dated 1987. Watercolour signed and dated 1987 · montenegro.com collection. Select a marker to read the annotation.

15 April 1979

Ninety seconds

The Montenegro earthquake damaged Forte Mare, cracked Kanli Kula and shook every fortification on this coast. The Citadela it destroyed. The heritage account does not soften it: after the earthquake, complete overturning of the younger walls occurred.

It has never been rebuilt. In 2017 a conservation workshop consolidated the surviving western wall, cleared the vegetation and repaired the walkways — that is stabilisation of a ruin, not restoration of a fortress, and the distinction matters.

The comparison with Forte Mare is the useful one. Forte Mare was rebuilt from a 1984 project that heritage scholarship criticises for smoothing six centuries of phases into one uniform masonry. The Citadela got no such treatment, and the result is that the most honest surviving evidence of the Herceg Novi defences is the pile nobody tidied.

The stone is still there. It is simply in the water now.

What survives of the Citadela, visible from the wall of Forte Mare
A high stone wall pierced by two rectangular gun openings, seen from below through palm fronds and dense green vegetation, with a flight of stone steps climbing past it.
Photograph by Falk2, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Reading the pair

The painting above is the fortress; the photograph beside this is the site. That is the whole comparison, and there is no version of it that is not bleak.

The watercolour is signed and dated 1987 — eight years after the earthquake. It is therefore not a picture painted from life before the collapse, but a reconstruction of a building that had already gone, made from memory or from earlier images. That does not make it less useful. For a fortification whose origin was never firmly dated and which no longer stands, a careful painting of what it looked like is close to the best evidence available.

The photograph is filed on Wikimedia Commons as the Zitadelle at Herceg Novi and shows masonry pierced by two openings of the kind the surveys describe as gun positions facing the sea. That identification is the photographer's, not ours, which is why it is stated rather than assumed. Set against the painting, it gives you the measure of what 1979 took: a fortress, reduced to a wall behind a palm tree.

15th → 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

Uncertain origin

15th century?

  • 15th c.?

    A core of undetermined date

    Herceg Novi’s heritage literature states the time of origin has not been reliably established; a 15th-century date is presumed, possibly under Herceg Stjepan Vukčić Kosača.

Ottoman

1482–1687

  • 1482–1687

    Two centuries in the Ottoman system

    The fortification serves through the Ottoman period at the southern edge of the defences.

Venetian

1687–1797

  • late 17th c.

    The crescent takes its form

    Semi-circular to polygonal, 8 m above the sea, gun positions facing the water, a cistern and a guard post. With Forte Mare it forms a single defensive system.

  • 1702

    Linked to the Lower Town

    A fortified wall, carried on a stone bridge above what is now Šetalište pet Danica, ties the Citadela to the town.

Austro-Hungarian

1814–1918

  • 19th c.

    Still in service, then not

    The fortification is used through the Austro-Hungarian period and then loses its purpose along with the rest of the system.

Yugoslav & Montenegrin

1918–today

  • 15 Apr 1979

    The Montenegro earthquake

    Complete overturning of the younger walls. The Citadela is the one element of the Herceg Novi defensive system that does not survive.

  • 2017

    A conservation workshop

    The western wall is consolidated, vegetation cleared and walkways repaired. Stabilisation, not reconstruction.

  • today

    Stone on the shore and in the sea

    Visible from the wall of Forte Mare. There is no ticket, no gate and no building to enter.

Corrections

What the internet gets wrong

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

Widely repeated

“Built in 1702.”

1702 is the date of the wall and bridge that connected the Citadela to the Lower Town, not of the fortification itself. The heritage survey is explicit that the origin date has never been established.

Not restored

The 2017 work was stabilisation.

A conservation workshop consolidated the western wall and cleared vegetation. Nothing was rebuilt, and no reconstruction is under way.

Check before you go

There is nothing to visit.

This is a ruin at the waterline beside a public promenade, not an attraction. The best view of what remains is from the wall of Forte Mare, looking down.

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.

Herceg Novi Then and NowForte MareKanli KulaŠpanjolaSahat kulaMamulaArzaTajno brdo
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