Adriatic views: Bar

The Mediterranean is where the olive tree, wheat and pomegranate grow. This is why, says Fabio Fiori in his Adriatic wanderings, the Montenegrin city of Bar, surrounded by wild pomegranates, merges with and embraces the soul of the great sea

The Mediterranean is a sea, but also a wider environment that according to some corresponds to the perimeter of diffusion of the olive tree. An area that changes over time, in relation to the climate and man, because the plant needs suitable environmental and cultivation conditions. The Mediterranean and the olive tree, the Mediterranean is the olive tree. A sacred plant for the ancient Greeks, linked to the goddess Athena, to be venerated and cultivated.

A plant of the Mediterranean triad, together with vine and wheat, without forgetting others, among which a place of honour goes to the pomegranate, whose fruits feed Persephone, daughter of Demeter and wife of Hades. “When Persephone tasted the pomegranate that grew in the dark gardens, death underwent a change”, because the girl brought to the realm of the dead “the invisible blood that continued to pulse in her white arms, the blood of those who continue to be fully alive, even in the palace of death”, writes legendary Italian bard Roberto Calasso.

Therefore Montenegro, Crna Gora in Montenegrin, literally black mountain, is for me the first, beloved, eastern Adriatic land of Persephone, because it is there that the pomegranate grows wild, also embellishing the roadsides, the ruins, the uncultivated, that third landscape that is today a treasure chest of biodiversity and wildness. So I choose the shade of a pomegranate tree, grown close to a medieval wall, to jot down my impressions of Bar Castle.

An archaeological area, partly rebuilt and reorganised in the 1980s thanks to the help of all the peoples of Yugoslavia, we read at the entrance to the park which, at least for me, also becomes a park of brotherhood. Here the ancient stones tell stories of peace and war, because there are ovens and towers, of Christians and Muslims, because the Cathedral of St. George built at the end of the 12^th century was transformed into a mosque in 1649, of gates and walls, of sedentary people and nomads.

The latter had their own hostel in the Middle Ages, later reorganised into a masjid, that is, a mosque without a minaret. Here I discover the word putnik, that is, traveller in Montenegrin, which to my ears sounds like a fanciful syncretism between put, path in Montenegrin, and nike, victory in Greek. From the top of the ruins of Tatarovica, the upper fortress, you can see the new city, the port and the sea.

An Islamic Adriatic, framed between pairs of minarets; an Orthodox Adriatic reflected in the domes of the bell towers, a Montenegrin Adriatic on which flies the red flag bordered with gold, with a golden double-headed eagle and a lion.

Bar is Antibari, in its historic port duality with its neighbour Bari. Bar is Antivari, in its twentieth-century railway dimension. A railway line designed and built in 1908 by the company of the same name, founded by Italian entrepreneurs, which built the Belgrade-Antivari route. And it is precisely at the old, shabby but fascinating station that my brief Antivari flânerie ends.

Today there are only about ten departures and as many arrivals; connections with Podgorica, Bijelo Polje and Belgrade. Long journeys, therefore I imagine fascinating. Express 432 leaves at 7:00 PM and arrives in Belgrade Central at 6:08 AM. Journeys that not even Google provides information about, eleven hours for 500 kilometres. I stop at the bar and, drinking a cool glass of vino od nara, pomegranate wine, study an old map of the railway line found online.

I dream of a new journey, from the shores of the Adriatic to those of the Belgrade water crossroads, between the Danube and the Sava, through the sacred mountains of Vladika Njegoš, the prince-bishop and poet, the Montenegrin Dante. I will take a pomegranate with me, eating a few seeds, from station to station, reciting aloud an apocryphal prayer: “Then Persephone remembered the pomegranate seeds, that sweet and sour taste, which still, like a distant memory, soaked her saliva”.

 

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