Kalaja: The Pirate Town

Kalaja is the oldest fortification in this series and the only one that is still somebody's address. It is a castle, a neighbourhood and an archaeological section all at once: the oldest remnants of its walls are Illyrian, and people are living inside them.

The Illyrians built on a small peninsula on the right side of the gulf. Before 162 BC the town belonged to an Illyrian people the sources call the Olcinijantas; Rome conquered them in the second century BC. Major changes came later from the Byzantines and then from Venice, which took Ulcinj after the fall of the state of Zeta in 1405 and held it for about a century and a half.

At the highest point stands the Balšić tower, named for the last representatives of the Balšić dynasty — a wealthy family from the Shkodër area who made Ulcinj their residence at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century. The Ottomans, who took the town in 1571, added a distinctive spherical top to it. You can date the empires on that one tower by looking up.

Ulcinj fell to the Ottomans in 1571, in the upheaval around the Battle of Lepanto and with the help of North African corsairs. Those corsairs then stayed.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the town's fleet is reported at some four hundred ships, crewed by men of North African and Albanian origin, raiding across the Mediterranean. They kidnapped wealthy Italian merchants for ransom, and Ulcinj operated what became the largest slave market on the Adriatic. The square in front of the church-mosque was called Slave Square. What that meant for the people sold in it is the next section.

It is now called Cervantes Square.

It is easy to write about corsairs as adventure. The trade they ran was the buying and selling of human beings, it was the town's major business for the better part of two centuries, and it has descendants.

By around 1650 Ulcinj had become a major slave-trading centre of the Mediterranean — taking over, the accounts say, from Herceg Novi at the other end of what is now Montenegro. It was profitable and it was legally sanctioned, which is the part that modern readers find hardest and which mattered most at the time.

Named arrivals

From the middle of the eighteenth century the records get specific. In 1770 Ulcinj's Ali Basha brought two enslaved women from Egypt. In 1775 a group returning from North Africa brought thirteen African men and women. Townspeople also bought people in Tripoli — brought there from Sudan and Chad — for resale in other Mediterranean ports.

Some were sold on. Others were kept in Ulcinj, and here the story turns in a direction most accounts of Adriatic piracy never follow: after a period of enslavement they became free citizens, working in agriculture and at sea.

A community, and then not

By 1878 the African community of Ulcinj numbered around 300 people, in roughly a hundred households. After Montenegro took the town in 1880 many left for Albania, and about sixty remained. By 1925 there were five households. Chattel slavery was formally abolished across the Ottoman Empire by imperial decree in 1887, by which time Ulcinj had not been Ottoman for seven years.

The last well-known member of the community was Rizo Šurla — a photographer, fisherman and bohemian, who had been a boxer and a waiter in Zagreb and a Partisan on the Srem Front. He died in 2003. His sister is the last direct descendant of Ulcinj's African community.

Only memories and emptiness remain.

On what is left of Ulcinj’s Afro-Albanian community

The square where people were sold is still there, in front of the church-mosque, a few minutes' walk inside these walls. It used to be called Slave Square. It is now Cervantes Square, named for a writer who was almost certainly never here — which is its own comment on how a town chooses to remember.

Ulcinj did not pass to Montenegro with Bar. Bar fell in January 1878; Ulcinj held out for nearly three more years. The Congress of Berlin and the negotiations that followed awarded the town to Montenegro, the Great Powers sent a naval squadron to make the point, Ottoman forces under Dervish Pasha fought at Klezna on 22 November 1880, and Riza Pasha was then given three days to hand the town over. The transfer took effect that month.

On 15 April 1979 the Montenegro earthquake struck, with its epicentre along this coast about six kilometres east of Stari Bar. It killed 31 people in Ulcinj and damaged the old town badly, the church-mosque among some 1,600 cultural monuments hit across the republic. Restoration over the following years brought the Venetian-era character of the stone houses back.

That is the difference between Kalaja and almost everything else in this series. Forte Mare is a cinema, Mamula is a hotel, Kosmač is a shell, Stari Bar is empty and the Citadela is in the sea. Kalaja was repaired because people needed to keep living in it — which is, in the end, the only conservation strategy that has ever reliably worked.