Thirty-three people live in Njeguši. The field around it gave Montenegro its dynasty and its protected ham — twenty-five hairpins above the Bay of Kotor.
Njeguši su planinski grad smješten između planine Lovćen i Bokokotorskog zaliva, poznat kao rodno mjesto dinastije Petrović-Njegoš koja je vjekovima vladala Crnom Gorom. Grad je podjednako poznato po svojim kulinarskim tradicijama, jer proizvodi najfiniji crnogorski dimljeni pršut (njeguški pršut) i ručno rađeni sir, sušene na planinskom vazduhu. Posjetioci prolaze kroz njega na istorijskom putu između Kotora i Cetinja, zaustavljajući se da probaju lokalne delicije na porodičnim tezgama uz put sa prostranim pogledom na zaliv ispod.
Prizori: Njeguši
The field, hamlet by hamlet
Residents by settlement in Njeguško polje, 2023 census
Two hundred and fourteen people across the five hamlets that still carry a published number. Dugi Do is marked “z” — the statute suppresses any figure under ten — and Majstori and Žanjev Do are recorded with no inhabitants at all. In 1927 the tribe counted 450 households.
MONSTAT 2023 census, settlement level
Ko posjećuje Crnu Goru
Udio noćenja stranih gostiju, 2025.
MONSTAT · 2025
Ko živi ovdje
Popis stanovništva, opština Njeguši
Njeguši is one settlement in a field the tribe once filled: 450 households in 1927, across the villages of the polje and the hamlets above and below it. Where six households make a village the line jumps — 17 people in 2003, 35 in 2011, 33 in 2023.
The field that supplied the rulers
What changed here over five centuries is which of the field’s own families led the country. Widths are to scale: the Petrović vladikas of Njeguši held Montenegro for 155 years.
sr.wikipedia (the Njeguši tribe; the Cetinje–Njeguši–Kotor road) · en.wikipedia (Petrović-Njegoš dynasty, Principality of Montenegro, Lovćen).
Twenty-five hairpins
The Kotor road: sea level to the Krstac saddle, then down onto the field
Josip Šilović Slade, an engineer from Trogir, laid out the first cart road in Montenegro between 1878 and 1884: 36.3 km from Kotor to Cetinje, at most five metres wide, climbing from one metre to nearly a thousand on twenty-five 180º turns, none of them steeper than 8%. Profile sampled on SRTM 30 m at 21 even points along the 20.9 km to Njeguši, plus the Krstac saddle at 944 m.
A day on the road
Njeguši keeps the hours of the Kotor road — under the 2026 order, from 25 May to 15 October, the serpentines run one direction at a time
09:00Njeguši → Kotor is prohibited from 08.00, so the morning traffic on the hairpins is all climbing
14:00for one hour the Krstac–Trojica section is closed in both directions
16:00the birth house in Erakovići shuts at five, 11 April to 15 November
1813
U međuvremenu — 1813
The year the poet was born in the field
Njeguši,13 November 1813: Radivoje “Rade” Petrović is born in Erakovići, in the house his uncle Petar I had built in 1779 — the middle of Tomo Petrović and Ivana Proroković’s five children, his mother from Mali Zalaz on the field’s northern rim. At twelve the monks at Cetinje teach him to read and write; at sixteen he is Prince-Bishop of Montenegro; he is dead at thirty-seven, having written Gorski vijenac.
The Boka —the same year Petar I, the ruling vladika and also born at Njeguši, declares the Bay of Kotor united with Montenegro. By 1815 the Austrian Empire has annexed the bay into Dalmatia, and no cart road connects the field to it until 1884.
Leipzig,16–19 October 1813: some 560,000 soldiers meet at the Battle of the Nations, the largest engagement of the Napoleonic wars, and Napoleon loses Germany.
London,28 January 1813: T. Egerton of Whitehall publishes Pride and Prejudice in three volumes.
Glasovi
“At Christmas the revelry here was unrestrained. The sausages hanging over a weak hearth fire went onto the flames; in the next house the crockery, the benches and a window were broken, and nobody was drunk. Bowls, soap and cakes were carried off, eaten or given to poorer houses — and nobody was angry or grudged the damage, because it was held that God would repay it.”
Pavle Rovinski, Russian ethnographer of Montenegro
Translated from the summary of Rovinski’s account of Christmas at Njeguši in the settlement’s Serbian Wikipedia article, which cites Ровински (1998), p. 126.
“Njeguši, from Njeguš — the personal name, of the same root as Njegomir and Njegoslav.”
Konstantin Jireček, historian of the medieval Balkans
Jireček’s derivation, set against Ilija Ruvarac’s older reading, which took the name from a founder called Njeguš appearing in a Latin charter of about the year 1000 as Negusius Podcupica. Both are given in the Serbian Wikipedia account of the tribe.
Njeguši: uporedite sve hotele
Pretražite hiljade hotela i apartmana sa aktuelnim cijenama.
Njeguši su grad na lovćenskoj visoravni na oko 900 m, na starom putu između Kotora i Cetinja. Od zaliva su četrdesetak pet minuta uz serpentine, unutar nacionalnog parka Lovćen, a čini ih nekoliko kamenih zaselaka oko zelenog kraškog polja.
Zašto su Njeguši poznati?
Zbog dvije stvari: rodno su grad dinastije Petrović Njegoš koja je vladala Crnom Gorom, i po njima se zove najpoznatiji suhomesnati proizvod u državi. Petar II Petrović Njegoš, vladika i pjesnik, rođen je ovdje 1813.
Šta je njeguški pršut?
Pršut soljen, dimljen na bukovini pa sušen na promaji koja prelazi preko visoravni — susretu morskog i planinskog vazduha pripisuje se ukus. Služi se u tankim listovima, obično uz domaći sir u ulju i čašu rakije.
Može li se posjetiti Njegoševa rodna kuća?
Može. Porodična kuća u gradu otvorena je kao mali muzej, s prostorijama i predmetima iz vremena dinastije. Skromna je, i u tome je poenta: pokazuje koliko su jednostavno crnogorski vladari zaista živjeli.
Vrijedi li se popeti?
Put iz Kotora atrakcija je koliko i grad — dvadeset pet okuka, sa zalivom koji se u svakoj otvara ispod. Uzak je i spor, i najbolje ga je voziti uzbrdo iz Kotora, a ne nizbrdo, kako se uostalom i odvija najveći dio saobraćaja.
Koliko se treba zadržati?
Sat ili dva. Jesti, obići kuću, izaći u polje, pa nastaviti za Cetinje ili gore do Njegoševog mauzoleja. Većina to spaja s Lovćenom u jedan izlet s primorja.
Ima li aerodrom u Njegušima?
Ne — najbliži je aerodrom Tivat (TIV), 23 km putem.
Njeguši – Cetinje: koliko je kilometara?
9,8 km putem, oko 16 min vožnje.
Koliko je bezbjedno u Njegušima?
Britansko Ministarstvo inostranih poslova (FCDO) nema upozorenje protiv putovanja u Crnu Goru; svoje smjernice je posljednji put revidiralo 13. avgusta 2026. To je njihova procjena države u cjelini, ne naša i ne ocjena o ovom gradu, pa je pročitajte sami prije puta. Broj za hitne slučajeve u Crnoj Gori je 112.
Lokalni tanjir
Njeguški pršut
Montenegro registered the name in 2016, and the registration is a recipe: a bone-in pig leg with the skin and the fat under it, dry-salted with sea salt, smoked over the slow burn of dry beech, then dried and matured for at least nine months. The protected name belongs only to hams made in the Njeguši territory — the villages of the polje, the two Zalazi, Žanjev Do, Mirac, Majstori and the hamlets up to Krstac. “Mountain ham” on a menu is a description, not the designation.
Gdje The family konobas along the old Kotor road, on the field itself
2023 census, Njeguši settlement — 61 people lived here in 1948
1435
Osnovan
the Njeguši in the Venetian archives, at a strength of 400 houses
901 m
Nadmorska visina
the floor of Njeguško polje, measured at the village on SRTM
23 km
Aerodrom
Tivat (TIV) by road, half an hour down — Podgorica (TGD) is 55 km
1952
Park
Lovćen national park, 62.2 km² — the village lies inside it
MONSTAT, Broj stanovnika po naseljima, Popis 2023 · sr.wikipedia (Njeguši; the Njeguši tribe) · en.wikipedia (Lovćen) · road distances measured on OpenStreetMap data, elevations on SRTM 30 m
Koliko vremena treba za Njeguši?
Nekoliko sati
1Up from Kotor on the R-1 — twenty-five hairpins, four metres to nine hundred, and in season the climb is barred after 14.00
2Njegoš’s birth house in Erakovići: a National Museum unit, 09.00–17.00 from 11 April to 15 November
3Pršut and cheese at a konoba on the field
4Velika Gospođa, the tribe’s cathedral church and the largest in the polje
Two hours, and most of it is the drive — which is the point.
Cio dan
1Kotor early, before the coaches reach the walls
2The serpentines up to the Krstac saddle, 944 m
3Njeguši: the birth house, then a long lunch on the field
4Jezerski vrh at 1,657 m and Meštrović’s marble mausoleum, finished in 1974
5Down the eastern side to Cetinje, 21 km on
The classic crossing of the mountain — coast to old capital, with Njeguši as the hinge.
Gdje odsjesti — Njeguši
Njeguško polje
Najbolje za waking in the field itself — Erakovići (93 residents) and Raičevići (52) are the two hamlets with more than fifty people left, and both lie inside the protected pršut’s territory
Lovćen national park
Najbolje za the park’s own bungalows and tent pitches inside the boundary, €30 and €3 a day on its price list
Cetinje, 21 km east
Najbolje za the old royal capital — hotels, museums and dinner, half an hour on the road rebuilt in 2018
Kotor, 21 km down
Najbolje za the bay and the sea, with the whole climb still ahead of you in the morning
