Montenegro's Roman capital got a railway. The sea got the visitors.

Start with a simple question

Why does money pile up in some places and not in others?

Go back to basics. A place earns money when people have a reason to stop there. There are only two reasons. People have to pass through it. Or people want to look at it.

Harbours and river crossings work for the first reason. Old ruins and pretty bays work for the second. Keep both ideas in your head. This whole story is those two ideas, tested on one small country.

1. Budva

It started as a harbour town of the Illyrians, the people who lived here before Rome. By the 6th to 5th century BCE it traded with the Greeks. Its graves held Greek-style pottery and jewellery.

Rome took it in the 2nd century BCE. Today it is a walled old town with a marina. Workers found Roman graves near Hotel Avala in the 1930s, while building the hotel.

Legend A story says a Phoenician prince named Cadmus founded it. That is a legend, so we leave it out.

2. Risan

Risan sits on a northern arm of the Bay of Kotor. It was a trading stronghold of the Illyrian kings. Diggers found 4,656 coins of King Ballaios hidden under a floor.

Rome and the Illyrians went to war in 229 BCE. Rome won the last war in 168 BCE. After that, Risan was a town of Roman citizens, with villas and mosaic floors.

Contested A Warsaw team has dug here since about 2001. They think one big building was a royal palace, maybe of Ballaios and Queen Teuta. That link is their guess.

3. Doclea

Doclea sits where the Morača and Zeta rivers meet. That spot is the way from the northern mountains down to Lake Skadar and the sea.

It became a Roman town in the 1st century CE, named after a local tribe, the Docleatae. Later it was the capital of a Roman province called Praevalitana. Experts call it the second-largest town in Roman Dalmatia.

It had a forum (the main square), a basilica, baths, temples and, later, three churches.

4. Kotor

Kotor sits at the far end of the bay. UNESCO says the Bay of Kotor region joins Illyrian, Slavic and Venetian traditions.

For the time before the year 1000, we found very little digging evidence for Kotor. So we call it Inferred. What is solid is the present. UNESCO listed the region in 1979.

5. Martinićka gradina

Many scholars think Doclea's people left around 609 CE after attacks by Avars and Slavs. One idea is that a bishop and some people moved to this hill near Danilovgrad, which was easier to defend.

Nobody has dug there to check, so this is a guess. On our map it is an area, not an exact spot.

How Doclea ended is disputed. Some sources say Goths sacked it in 490. Others say Avars destroyed it in the 7th century.

6. Stari Bar

Stari Bar is a hill town above the Bar coast. Many peoples ruled it over the centuries. A team from Venice, Koper and the city of Bar has dug here since 2004.

By the late 1800s the town was almost empty. People moved down to the coast.

Sources disagree on when Bar first shows up in writing: the 6th century or the 8th.

A Montenegrin voice

Tatjana Koprivica and Olga Pelcer-Vujačić work at the Historical Institute of the University of Montenegro. They wrote signed parts of a recent paper on Doclea.

• Koprivica reports a graveyard found in 2013 and 2014 with more than 80 graves. Montenegrin archaeologists found 171 more graves in 2024.
• Pelcer-Vujačić says a church inscription naming a woman deacon, Ausonia, is now lost. It was last seen in 1902, and part of it ended up in a farmhouse.
• The paper also records that the Montenegrin state built the 1947 railway over Italian objections.

The lead authors are Italian, so we count only the signed Montenegrin parts as the local voice. Read the paper.