Tajno brdo: The Hill They Hollowed Out

Tajno brdo — Secret Hill — is not on the municipality’s list of fortresses, and it is the most heavily fortified thing in this series. It is not a building. It is a hill that four different powers dug into, and the only site here whose most important structures are underground.

It starts as ground rather than architecture. On 15 September 1687, while Venice was besieging Herceg Novi, an Ottoman relief army under the vizier Husein Topal-pasha came down toward the town and was ambushed at Kotobil by Venetian, Perastian, Herzegovinian and Montenegrin forces. Over three hundred Ottoman soldiers were killed and twelve standards taken. Two weeks later Herceg Novi fell, and two centuries of Ottoman rule ended.

In the nineteenth century Austria-Hungary put a battery position on the summit — defensive walls, cannon positions, wire obstacles — one of four covering the approach to Herceg Novi from Crkvica. Mamula and Arza closed the sea; this closed the land. And then they dug tunnels into the hill beneath the guns, which is where the name stops being decorative.

Between 1941 and 1944 prisoners from the Mamula and Prevlaka concentration camps were brought up to this hill and executed. A memorial plaque marks it.

It is worth stating the connection plainly, because the two places are usually described separately. Mamula is an island with a hotel on it and a recorded death toll of 130. Tajno brdo is an overgrown hill above a village with a plaque on it. Some of the people counted in the first number were killed in the second place. The camp and the execution ground are one system, about eleven kilometres apart.

That is also the reason this hill belongs in a series about fortifications rather than in a separate article about the war. Every other site here was built to keep an enemy out of the town. This one was used, for three years, on people who were already prisoners.

The last layer is socialist. In the Yugoslav period a monumental reinforced-concrete shelter was built underground on Tajno brdo, connected into the older Austro-Hungarian tunnel system.

The sequence is worth reading in order. The hill was fought over because it commanded the approach; then fortified against ships and armies; then used as a killing ground; then hollowed out against the bomb. Four different ideas of what a threat looks like, cut into the same 490 metres of limestone.

Nothing on the summit is signposted, and the underground works are unlit and unsafe. What the hill offers instead is the clearest view in the municipality of the thing this whole series is about: the entrance to the bay, the town below it, and every reason anyone ever had to fortify either.