Montenegro's culture: one inheritance under two names

What Montenegrins say their language is

Article 13 of the constitution adopted in 2007 settles the matter in one line: the official language in Montenegro shall be Montenegrin. The next line makes the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets equal, and the one after it puts Serbian, Bosniac, Albanian and Croatian into official use as well.

The 2023 census then asked residents about the same thing from three directions. Monstat, the statistical office, recorded nationality, mother tongue and the language a person usually speaks, and its methodology treated every answer as a free self-declaration, with "does not want to declare" available to anyone who refused.

Read across the rows, the census of 2023 shows a net 41,137 more people declaring Montenegrin nationality than naming Montenegrin as their mother tongue, and 63,937 more naming Serbian as their mother tongue than declaring themselves Serbs. The rest of the language question splits smaller: Bosnian at 6.97%, Albanian at 5.25%, Russian at 2.36%, and 2.08% who answered with the compound name Serbian-Croatian.

The two names describe speech that the standard reference works treat as mutually intelligible. Montenegrin, Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian are, in the English Wikipedia's wording, standard varieties of the Serbo-Croatian language. Britannica adds two details. Montenegrin pronunciation sits closer to Croatian than to Serbian, and some scholars have tried to mark the difference by adding letters to the alphabet for consonants specific to Montenegrin speech, letters that are not widely used.

So the dispute is over a name, and each side has its reading. One holds that Montenegrin is a language of its own, which is the constitution's position. The other holds that what is spoken in Montenegro is Serbian, which is how 43.18% of residents answered in 2023. This catalogue records both and settles neither.

The identity figures have moved far more than the speech. Britannica traces the swing: in 1981 more than two-thirds of residents identified as Montenegrin and only a tiny share as Serb, and by the early 1990s the proportions stood at about three-fifths and one-tenth. The 2023 census put the two at 41.12% and 32.93%.

How a press at Cetinje printed Cyrillic books

Written culture in the Montenegrin lands began in the monasteries. Britannica dates the Gospel of Miroslav to 1186 to 1190, transcribed from an earlier Macedonian text, and records that the first written work of Montenegrin literature, the Kingdom of the Slavs of 1177 to 1189 by the priest Dukljanin of Bar, survives only in a seventeenth-century copy in Latin. Manuscripts dating from the thirteenth century are still kept in Montenegrin monasteries, and the Cetinje Monastery holds an important collection of them.

The step that later Montenegrin institutions count from came at the end of the fifteenth century. Djuradj Crnojević built a monastery at Cetinje, founded a bishopric there and imported a printing press from Venice, which produced some of the earliest books in Cyrillic script after 1493. In 1494 it printed the Oktoih, a liturgical book. Britannica spells it Ostoih, glosses it as the Book of Psalms, and describes it as believed to be the first book printed in Cyrillic from the South Slavic region, thirty-eight years after Gutenberg's invention.

The country's own institutions still count from that date. The national bibliography published at Cetinje in 1993 runs from 1494 to 1994, and the Central National Library of Montenegro carries the printer's name, Đurđe Crnojević.

The coast kept a separate written tradition. In Venetian Kotor a circle of writers and poets introduced Renaissance culture in Latin and Italian, among them Ludovico Pasquali and Giovanni Bona de Boliris. The first Montenegrin newspaper appeared in 1871.

Why Njegoš belongs to two national canons

Petar II Petrović Njegoš took office as prince-bishop in 1830 and died in 1851. He ruled the state and headed the church, and he also wrote The Mountain Wreath, an epic composed in the Montenegrin vernacular on the substratum of oral folk poetry. The English Wikipedia calls it the central point of Montenegrin culture at the time.

He is claimed from both sides. Montenegro keeps Njegoš Day on 13 and 14 November, one of the pairs of non-working days fixed by the Law on State and Other Holidays of 2007, alongside Independence Day and Statehood Day. Britannica records that he is also celebrated widely among Serbs. His mausoleum stands on Mount Lovćen, the mountain whose dense evergreen forests gave Crna Gora, the Black Mountain, its name.

The rest of the nineteenth-century canon has the same double standing. Wikipedia's account of Montenegrin literature defines it as everything written in Montenegro, mainly in Montenegrin, Serbian and related languages, and then says that its most important writers lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and wrote mainly in Serbian. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century names on it include Petar I Petrović-Njegoš, Andrija Zmajević, Vuk Vrčević, Stefan Mitrov Ljubiša and Marko Miljanov.

The twentieth century added Mihailo Lalić, Milovan Đilas, Radovan Zogović, Ćamil Sijarić and Mirko Kovač. The institutions listed for it include the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts, Matica crnogorska, the Montenegrin PEN Center and the Podgorica Book Fair.

Montenegro also appears in other people's books. The Croatian poet Ivan Mažuranić set The Death of Smail-aga Čengić there, Rex Stout made his detective Nero Wolfe a native, and the 2006 film Casino Royale is partly set in the country.

What the gusle and the oro carry

The gusle is a bowed instrument with a single string, and it is played by the singer himself. The guslar sings or recites stories of heroes and battles in lines of ten syllables, and the English Wikipedia records that guslars once commanded nearly as much respect as the best warriors, because they were authors and history writers as much as performers. Britannica traces Montenegrin literature itself to folk poetry sung to the gusla, which it describes as a type of folk fiddle.

The tradition crosses the border. It is livelier in the northern parts of the country, and it is shared with eastern Herzegovina, western Serbia and central Dalmatia.

Traditional music splits by region. Wikipedia distinguishes the Gulf of Kotor, Old Montenegro and the Sanjak, and the music of Old Montenegro is built around the gusle and is mainly vocal or vocal with instrumental accompaniment. Many songs are adapted from the epics.

The dance works the same way. The oro, called the eagle dance, is a circle dance in which couples take turns in the centre, and it ends with the dancers forming a human pyramid, standing on each other's shoulders. It belongs to the wider family of circle dances called kolo, danced by Montenegrins, Serbs and Macedonians alike, usually by several dozen people holding hands or waists.

The ethical ideal the sources attach to this culture is čojstvo i junaštvo, humaneness and gallantry. Britannica describes the clans, groups of patrilineally related families that once held their own territories, as prizing personal courage in combat above other virtues under constant Ottoman pressure. Clan autonomy ended with the Yugoslav state and general public schooling, but clans remain part of social life, and clan nepotism in public hiring is a standing complaint. Before the secessions of the early 1990s Montenegrins supplied about one-fifth of the generals of the Yugoslav People's Army, which Britannica attributes partly to the premium on courage and partly to the narrow economic openings at home.

Which church Montenegro's Orthodox majority attends

The 2023 census counted 71.10% of residents as Orthodox, 19.99% as Muslim, 3.27% as Catholic and 2.29% as atheist. The Orthodox share is itself split. About 90% of Orthodox believers follow the Serbian Orthodox Church, which governs its Montenegrin flock through the Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral and the Eparchy of Budimlja and Nikšić. The remaining tenth follow the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, which broke away in 1993 and is recognised neither by the Ecumenical Patriarchate nor by any other canonical Orthodox church.

Both churches reach back to the same history. From 1516 until 1852 Montenegro was ruled by the prince-bishops of Cetinje, and Britannica records that Montenegrins were led by their own metropolitan until their church was absorbed into the Serbian patriarchate in 1920. The same division drives the dispute over church property covered in Montenegro's politics.

The calendar carries the split into daily life. The Serbian Orthodox Church keeps the Julian calendar, so Christmas falls on 7 January. On Christmas Eve a young oak, preferably a straight Austrian oak, is felled early in the morning, brought into the house as the badnjak and laid on the fire in the evening, with rituals that vary by region. The Slava, the feast of a family's patron saint, is a custom of Serbian Orthodox families.

The state handles the plurality by law. The Law on Celebrating Religious Holidays of 1993 gives each community its own days off, so Orthodox Christmas is a non-working day only for Orthodox believers, and Catholics take 25 and 26 December instead. A protocol of 2012 recognised Islam officially, which guarantees halal food in military and public facilities, headscarves in schools and time off for Friday prayer. In the 2023 census 8,085 Albanians were Catholic and 22,520 were mainly Sunni Muslims.

What Venice and the Ottomans built in Montenegro

The coast and the interior were built by different powers, and the buildings still show which was which. UNESCO listed the natural and culturo-historical region of Kotor in 1979, immediately after the earthquake of that year damaged four Romanesque churches and the town walls. In the Middle Ages Kotor had its own schools of masonry and of icon painting. Its cathedral of St Tryphon was first built in the eighth century and rebuilt in 1166. In the bay the Baroque church of Our Lady of the Rocks stands on an islet, and the coast also holds the Savina Monastery and the basilica of St Luke, more than 800 years old. Budva's old town was destroyed in the same 1979 earthquake and has since been rebuilt.

Two more UNESCO listings are shared with neighbours. The Venetian defence works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are listed as six components in Italy, Croatia and Montenegro, spread over more than 1,000 kilometres from Lombardy to the eastern Adriatic. The stećci, carved limestone tombstones of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, are listed as 28 graveyards in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia. UNESCO notes that all three medieval Christian communities buried their dead under them: the Orthodox, the Catholic and the Church of Bosnia.

Byzantine influence shows most in the interior. Britannica dates Montenegrin murals to the tenth century and singles out a thirteenth-century cycle on the life of St Elias in the Morača monastery. The Ottoman north has the sixteenth-century Husein-Pasha Mosque in Pljevlja. Village building is plainer: houses in the karst poljes are mostly of stone, often laid without mortar.

Cetinje, the old royal capital, keeps the institutions. The National Museum of Montenegro runs five complexes there, with separate art, ethnographic and historical museums, and the town holds the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Drama.

What Montenegrin cooking is built on

The cooking follows the same line between coast and interior. On the Adriatic coast the dishes are Mediterranean and carry a strong Italian influence, visible in how bread is baked, how cheese is made and meat is cured, and in the wines and spirits produced; seafood is a common dish. The heartland and the north cook differently, from the uplands where sheepherding is the principal farming activity.

The Ottoman centuries left the largest layer of dishes: sarma, musaka, pilav, pita, gibanica, burek, ćevapi, kebab and đuveč, with baklava and tulumba among the sweets. Hungarian cooking contributed goulash and sataraš, and Central Europe the crêpes, doughnuts, jams, biscuits and cakes.

Little of the land is farmed. Britannica puts the farmed area at less than a tenth of the country, with about two-fifths of that under grain. One custom concerns the olive tree: newly married couples plant an olive tree on their wedding day, a practice King Nikola made into law during his reign.

How Montenegrin performers and athletes built reputations

Most of Montenegro's formal music institutions date from the twentieth century. The oldest singing society, Jedinstvo, was founded in Kotor in 1839, and a Catholic singing academy opened there in the nineteenth century. The first music school in the country opened in Cetinje in 1934, and music schools followed during the 1940s and 1950s in nine towns from Kotor to Berane. Jovan Ivanišević, who lived from 1860 to 1889, wrote piano miniatures and choral songs performed as far away as Prague. In the first half of the twentieth century two schools of composition formed, one in Cetinje and one in Podgorica, and Radio Titograd helped popularise their music by broadcasting music programmes daily.

Painting took western styles years after they had peaked in Paris, by Britannica's account. Milo Milunović used Post-Impressionist technique on the Montenegrin landscape at mid-century, Petar Lubarda turned Expressionism on the same subject after the war, and from the 1990s the Cetinje Biennial gave Montenegrin artists a larger audience.

Dušan Vukotić won an Academy Award for an animated short film in 1961, as a Yugoslav director, and Veljko Bulajić and Živko Nikolić also came from Montenegro. In 2013 the country submitted Bad Destiny for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Montenegrin National Theatre in Podgorica is the only professional theatre, and in summer the City Theatre in Budva hosts companies from across the former Yugoslavia.

Rock musicians from Montenegro such as Miladin Šobić and Rambo Amadeus were popular throughout the former Yugoslavia, and Perper from Cetinje is the band most often named. Montenegro has entered the Eurovision Song Contest as an independent state since 2007, and the Montefon music awards, given from 2001 to 2007, were revived in 2024.

Water polo is treated as the national sport. The men's team took gold at the 2008 European Championship in Málaga and at the 2009 World League in Podgorica, and PVK Primorac of Kotor won the LEN Euroleague in 2009. The women's handball team won the country's first Olympic medal, a silver, at the 2012 Summer Olympics, and the European Championship the same year.