Skadarsko jezero

Skadarsko jezero refuses to hold still. The largest lake of the Balkans is a cryptodepression — parts of its bed lie below sea level, fed by sub-lacustrine springs the fishermen call oka, eyes — and it breathes with the rain, swelling from around 350 square kilometres in late summer to 550 in winter, when the Morača pushes floodwater across the northern marshes. Two-thirds of the water is Montenegrin, the rest Albanian, and the Montenegrin share with its shore became a national park in 1983 — the round 40,000 hectares in the proclamation was never more than an estimate for a park whose area changes with the weather. The northern shallows are the prize: kilometres of water lily, water chestnut and flooded willow — the "floating meadows" — over which the park's emblem fishes, the Dalmatian pelican, one of the westernmost breeding colonies of a bird that once nested across half of Europe.

The bird list runs past 280 species, which puts this wetland in the continent's first rank: pygmy cormorants in the thousands, whiskered terns nesting on the lily rafts, herons and glossy ibis working the reedbeds, and in winter huge rafts of ducks and coot that the raptors follow down from the mountains. Under the surface the lake is just as particular — endemic trout and bleak among some fifty fish species, and the ukljeva (bleak) fishery, worked with techniques the villages refined over centuries, remains the shore's living tradition along with the Crmnica vineyards above Virpazar, home slope of the vranac grape.

People built on the lake as if it were land. The islets of the southern shore carry a string of fourteenth-century Orthodox monasteries — Beška, Moračnik, Starčeva Gorica, with Vranjina's older St Nicholas by the causeway — a "holy mountain of Zeta" in miniature, several again housing monks and nuns after the twentieth century emptied them. On the northern marsh edge stands Žabljak Crnojevića, the fortress capital of the Crnojević lords of Zeta until 1478, when the Ottoman advance sent Ivan Crnojević uphill to found Cetinje — the walls still rise complete out of the wet plain, reached by a lane from Golubovci. Grmožur, a fortified islet off Godinje, served King Nikola as a prison — the local joke names it the Montenegrin Alcatraz, garrisoned by warders who could not swim — and at the lake's western tip the Rijeka Crnojevića winds to the old river port in the tightest of horseshoe bends, best seen from the Pavlova strana viewpoint above.

What's worth knowing before you go

Virpazar, half an hour from Podgorica by road or the Bar railway, is the practical gateway: the visitor centre is at Vranjina by the causeway, and the boat skippers — the only way into the floating meadows — tout from the bridge. Take a small boat over a big one and go at first light or last, when the birds are moving and the water lies like poured glass; kayak rental from Virpazar or Rijeka Crnojevića suits the patient. Birders should aim for May–June or the winter counts; the pelican colony is closed ground, watched from a respectful distance.

The southern shore road from Virpazar toward Murići — narrow, slow, and stunning — is the drive, with detours down to the monastery jetties; boats to Beška and Moračnik are arranged in Murići. The connoisseur's stop is a konoba in Godinje, the half-fortified wine village above the lake, for vranac and carp done in the smoke — and the honest advice is that August turns the lake soupy and loud around Virpazar, while a mist-still November morning on the north shore is the best day the park gives.