Prcanj, Bay of Kotor, Montenegro

While in Prčanj (pronounced “Prchañ”), a village in the Bay of Kotor, in Montenegro, we would wake up to the sight of the austere stone building “tre sorele,” (“three sisters”), framed by the beautiful bay of Kotor (“Boka Kotorska” in Montenegrin) and the mountains, still in shadow, across the bay. We would start the day with a walk across the small road which lines the water’s edge, to the end of the stone pontoon and a swim in the Bay. Coming back to the house, we would rinse ourselves on the front terrace where two large bright red buckets had been strategically placed for this purpose. We would repeat this routine at the end of each day spent visiting neighboring places, either on foot or with the rental car. The water then would be quite a bit warmer after a full day in the Montenegrin sun. In Prčanj, we stayed at the house of Zika and Margita, parents of our friend Jelena.

On the first day there, they told us the legend behind “tre sorele,” which goes something like this. Three sisters used to live in that house, in three bedrooms on the first floor, looking on the Bay. All three were in love with the same man, a sailor, who had left and whose return all three were waiting for. When one sister died after the sailor had failed to return, the other two had the window of her former bedroom bricked-up. When the second sister died, with still no sign from the sailor, the one sister still alive did the same to that bedroom window. When the third sister finally died, with no one left in the house, her bedroom window remained untouched. According to legend, the sailor never returned to Prčanj. In fact, there is only one bricked-up window on the facade of tre sorele, so reality is not fully compatible with the legend, but this matters little.

The hills around Prčanj are covered in silver clumps of wild sage, wild thyme, thorny bushes of all kinds, olive trees. Fig trees also seem to grow everywhere there, as do wild (?) pomegranate trees ─ I was excited to see a pomegrate tree up close for the very first time. The pomegranates were small and some of them had burst open while still on the tree. I now regret not trying to eat one from those trees, although Vlada and I ate plenty of the juicy green figs both from the trees in the garden of the house as well as from those trees in the hills.