San Giovanni: A Thousand Years of Wall

Almost every fortified town in this series solved the same problem the same way: a wall around the houses and a fort on the high ground. Kotor did something else. Its wall leaves the water and keeps going — up a cliff, for 260 vertical metres, until it reaches the summit and stops.

The result is four and a half kilometres of fortification, climbed today by about 1,350 steps, wrapping a mountainside rather than a settlement. Seen from the bay it reads less like a defence than a ribbon laid across the rock. It is the largest fortification in Montenegro by a wide margin, and the only one in this series inside a UNESCO World Heritage property.

It was not built by anyone in particular. The fortifications went up between the ninth and the nineteenth centuries and are usually described as a blend of Illyrian, Byzantine, Venetian and Austrian military architecture — four civilisations, each adding to what it found. Venice, which held the town from 1420 to 1797, did most of it.

When the ring closed

One detail is worth holding on to, because it undercuts the postcard. The walls did not actually form a continuous ring around the Old Town until the thirteenth or fourteenth century. For most of its early life this was not a sealed circuit but an accumulation of positions — a hilltop, a fortress, stretches of wall — that only later got joined into the single object visitors now walk.

Two earthquakes define what stands. The great earthquake of 1667 devastated Kotor, as it devastated Dubrovnik and much of this coast; everything below the summit has been repaired at least once because of it.

The second was on 15 April 1979 — the same shock that destroyed the Citadela at Herceg Novi and cracked Forte Mare. In Kotor it seriously damaged a large number of monuments, including four Romanesque churches and the town walls themselves.

That is worth setting beside Herceg Novi. The same earthquake, forty kilometres apart, produced two opposite outcomes: Kotor was rebuilt with international help and is now a World Heritage town; the Citadela was never rebuilt at all and is stone in the water. What decides which fortification survives is rarely the fortification.

San Giovanni is the busiest fortification in Montenegro. There is a ticket, a path, and in high summer a queue on the lower steps. The route passes the Church of Our Lady of Remedy about halfway up and ends at the fortress on the summit, with the whole inner bay laid out below.

Sources differ on the height — 260 metres is the figure most often given for the fortress, some say 280 — and on almost everything else about the early phases. What is not in dispute is the shape of the thing: a thousand years of people deciding that this rock was worth the walk.