In the 19th century, the Bay of Kotor was the empire’s southern edge. Austria had held the coast since 1814, and just behind the mountains sat Montenegro and the Ottomans. The border villages of Krivošije rebelled twice, and each uprising pushed Vienna to build more.
Gorazda: the gate on the road to Cetinje. The fort stands about 10 km from Kotor and watches the Austrian road to Cetinje, then Montenegro’s capital. An earlier fort stood here in the 1860s, and the current structure was built in 1884 to 1886. Its star is a 100-ton German-made Gruson rotating turret, hand-cranked, the last of its kind to survive. In World War I, Montenegrin guns on Mount Lovćen shelled it, and the Austrians added concrete infantry positions on the roof in 1915. It was never destroyed. After the war, the Yugoslav Army used it as a depot into the early 1990s. Today it is abandoned and open to visit.
Vrmac: the ridge between two bays. Vrmac Fort sits at about 485 m on the ridge between the Bay of Kotor and the Bay of Tivat. The site was fortified in 1860, and the present fort was built in 1894 to 1897. Together with Gorazda and the Škaljari Battery, it formed one group that covered the pass and the whole bay. Gorazda and Vrmac sit on opposite sides of the pass, so each covered the other’s flank. An Austrian military road, built after 1882, ties Vrmac to the Trojica pass.
Kom and Stražnik: the plateau fortress. Further inland, above Risan and the Krivošije country, lies the Crkvice karst depression at about 1,100 m. Fort Kom, called Ostfort Crkvice by the Austrians, was built in 1882 to 1883, right after the Second Krivošije Uprising. It follows a general design by Colonel Karl Wahlberg. Its job was to control Crkvice and the roads onto the plateau from the Ottoman side. Fort Stražnik, the Westfort, nicknamed the Eagle’s Nest, stands west of the village and watched the same ground. Around them grew a real mountain garrison: barracks, stables, a hospital, a bakery built in 1907, a church, a canteen, even a funicular and tennis courts for officers. In World War I, thousands of soldiers lived there.
Were they connected? Gorazda, Vrmac and Škaljari worked as one defence of the pass and the bay. Kom and Stražnik guarded a different threat, the mountain border and the rebellious plateau. All of them belonged to one fortress system, the “Sea Fortress Boka”.
And these are only four. One guide counts 83 fortifications in that system, according to the author Radojica Pavićević. They include the island fort Mamula, the Arza and Oštro forts at the mouth of the bay (1850 to 1854), Fort Kosmač above Budva, and Fort Trašte, which joined the system around 1909.
