Kotor | The Bay Where Sailors Have Built an Island Stone by Stone for 570 Years

Every 22 July at sunset, the boats of Perast row out with stones and throw them into the sea around Our Lady of the Rocks, a church island that sailors built by hand, by tradition since 1452. At the far end of the Bay of Kotor, the walled old town has only about 1,360 registered residents, yet around 500 cruise ships a year come to Montenegro, most squeezing through a strait barely 300 metres wide. So how did a hidden bay with almost no flat land become a nation of sailors, and why do its people stay? In this documentary: why the Bay of Kotor is a ria, not a fjord; the Verige strait; the legend of the icon on the rock and how the island was built; the walls and the steps to St John's fortress; the cats of Kotor; St Tryphon and the Boka Navy; Queen Teuta at Risan; Venice and the Bocche di Cattaro (1420–1797); Barbarossa, the defence of Perast in 1654, Marko Martinović's school for Peter the Great's nobles and Admiral Matija Zmajević; the flag buried in Perast in 1797; the Cattaro mutiny of 1918; the 1979 earthquake and UNESCO; independence in 2006; The Old Map (Coronelli, 1688); the cruise-ship debate; a day in Perast; buzara and Njeguši prosciutto; practical tips; and the Fašinada. Sources include MONSTAT (Statistical Office of Montenegro), UNESCO World Heritage Centre and the 2025 UNESCO/ICOMOS mission, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Perast Museum, R. Tomić (Matica hrvatska, 2018), Polybius, CIN-CG, Reuters and Earth Magazine. Footage: licensed stock (Motion Array). Maps: Natural Earth (public domain). Archival images: Wikimedia Commons (public domain unless credited below).