Kanli Kula: The Bloody Tower

Kanli Kula belongs to the same decade as the most famous siege in this town’s history, and to the winning side of it. When Hayreddin Barbarossa retook Castelnuovo from its Spanish garrison in August 1539, the Ottomans set about making sure it could not happen again.

The programme that followed gave Forte Mare its bulk and its crenellated crown. On the high ground north of the Old Town it produced something new: a large rectangular fortress commanding the landward approach, hollow inside, with a cistern sunk into its floor to keep a garrison in water through a siege.

Herceg Novi’s own heritage inventory dates it to the sixteenth century and notes that the first written record of it comes only in 1664, when the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi passed through. Wikipedia puts the construction at 1539 precisely. Both are consistent: a fortress built in the aftermath of 1539 and only described in writing a century and a quarter later.

At some point the fortress stopped being only a fortress. The cistern — a stone chamber cut into the floor, with one way in — was turned into a cell, and the building acquired the name it has carried ever since: Kanlı Kule in Turkish, the bloody tower.

It was said locally that the doors of Kanli Kula opened only one way for an inmate: neither release nor escape was expected. That is lore rather than record, and worth holding at arm’s length. What is not lore is what the prisoners left behind.

The prisoners dated the building

The walls of the cell are covered in carvings: galleys and other ships, crosses, coats of arms, names and dates, scratched into the stone by men with nothing else to do and no expectation of leaving. They are still there.

And they turned out to be evidence. The vessel types depicted were in service in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which allowed historians to date the founding of the prison from the drawings themselves. A building whose written record begins in 1664 was dated by its inmates, in graffiti, from the inside.

The men who were never going to leave are the reason we know when the door first shut.

The carved ships in the cell, read as archaeological evidence

Venice took the town on 30 September 1687 and repaired Kanli Kula in the same programme that patched Forte Mare and renamed it. Under Austria-Hungary the fortress became a garrison building, one more structure in a bay stiff with military installations, and then — like most of the system — it stopped having a job at all.

The second life began in 1960, when the interior was adapted as a summer stage; by 1966 it had been rebuilt as an open-air amphitheatre. Concrete tiers were poured inside an Ottoman shell, and the room where prisoners waited became a place where a thousand people sit down together in the dark.

The 1979 earthquake damaged the interior badly. The reconstruction that followed was executed in what its own describers call the Venetian style — worth noticing, because the fortress is Ottoman. Like Forte Mare’s 1984 rebuild, what you are looking at is partly a later century’s idea of what the place should have looked like.

Today Kanli Kula is the largest of the Herceg Novi stages, programmed by JUK Herceg Fest. The film festival whose line runs back to the first Yugoslav Festival of Film Direction in 1987 screens here; so do the Guitar Art Summer Fest and the Operosa opera festival. It is, by a wide margin, the most cheerful use any prison in the Bay of Kotor has ever been put to.