Snæfellsnes Peninsula

"I wonder how many car commercials are filmed here," Merlin said.  We drove through the lava fields of the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, the road cutting through the seemingly endless stretch of jagged basalt rocks.  Cooled lava.  A yellow moss covered whole patches of rock like a golden crumb topping over baked blueberries.  In the far distance, you could see the chartreuse grassy patches of the next terrain in an endless progression of surreal landscapes.  You could almost hear the car commercial voice over speaking slowly and deeply about natural beauty, the open road, horsepower.  Intrigue.  Beauty.

We'd see only one car at a time on the road.  Mostly, we were alone, free to stop for photos, brake for sheep, turn around for signs that read "Dead Whale."  At times, I was reminded of the lunar landscape of Pag Island, Croatia, whose desolation was achingly beautiful.  Then, the lusher landscapes would conjure up childhood memories of watching The Secret of Roan Inish. 

It's impossible to really compare Snæfellsnes Peninsula with anywhere else.  Real or imagined.  It feels so surreal and otherwordly that Jules Verne chose its large glacier as the setting for A Journey to the Center of the Earth.  I think Merlin really put it best in our daily notes on our first night: "This looks like a fictional land, made up to be filmed in New Zealand and computer enhanced to become unbelievable."

The largest town on the peninsula is Stykkishólmur, the sort of town you can imagine being painted and glued down piece by piece by a pair of enormous hands creating an idyllic setting for their model train set.  The cookie cutter houses mostly date back to the late 19th century and have been protected from the harsh weathered fate of most harbour buildings by the big, basalt island right off shore.  It stretches out like a protective wall, its lighthouse blinks away mist at the top.  Once can imagine this scene being mostly the same over a century ago.

People call Snæfellsnes Peninsula "Iceland in Miniature." You can get a taste of the diverse natural beauty of the whole island in a drive around its western appendage, they say.  You've got your fishing villages with bright orange mussels and your lonely farmstead in the shadow of a hulking mountain.  You've got the sea, the springs, rivers, lakes, sheep, horses, birds galore.  Corrugated tin roof houses painted bright colors and prefab cottages with red or blue roofs. 

Black stone beaches, golden sand ones, water brimming with islands or lapping up in turquoise turning to foam.  This beach, on the northern coast of the peninsula, was flanked on both sides by craggy, imposing 'bird cliffs.'  There were no birds at the moment, but their plentiful white droppings acted as a "we were here" tag.

There are viking ruins, ancient water sources, elf cathedrals, craters and fresh water pools, fjords, cliffs, museum cafes selling 'love balls.'  And very few people.  Every house seemed to hold court over its own mini kingdom, a majestic buffer zone between it and its closest neighbor.  

As we left Snæfellsnes Peninsula, taking the road east on the northern coast, the scenery became downright pastoral.  The first trees we'd seen in days popped up, carefully planted around houses to offer some privacy.  The whole experience, the last 48 hours, started to feel like a trip to Oz as we left.  Except that here we were in a technicolor Kansas that was as fantastically beautiful as any of the rest.  I'm starting to feel a little bamboozled by all this awesomeness. 

A Rotten Bite of Iceland

Icelandic people have a famous delicacy – a vice, some might say – that they hang in little drying houses and eat with pinched noses.  It’s called kæstur hákarl, but is more commonly called just hákarl.  What is it?  Rotten and dried shark meat.  Is it all that bad? Well…

Here, a small family drying house sits by a chilly bay.  The meat inside had crusted on the outside and turned yellow.  It was protected from varmints by chickenwire, but left open to the wind and flies.  It smelled of fish, ammonia and barnyard.  This is a delicacy that’s not exactly delicate.

Hildibrandur Bjarnason (left) and his son, Brynjar Hild Brandsson, are the biggest hákarl producers in Iceland, processing about eighty of the big sharks a year on their remote farm, Bjarnarhöfn.  Hildibrandur is a jolly man who seems to thoroughly enjoy his product and his life.  Besides rotting fish, the men are especially proud of their prize Icelandic horses, which roam semi-free in green pastures by the North Atlantic.  The father and son have the mixed sturdiness of fishermen and farmers; they live solidly and simply.  We were shown pictures of Hildibrandur hoisting one-ton fish with the bucket of his tractor, the earth muddy beneath the wheels, the sea misty behind.

Hildibrandur’s family ferment only the native Greenland shark, a coldwater species that lives further north than any other shark.  The huge fish can grow over twenty feet long, weigh as much as a ton and fish at depths of seven thousand feet. Extreme levels of uric acid and trimethylamine oxide in the flesh act as anti-freeze, allowing the shark to stay alive in water barely above freezing – but also making the meat highly toxic to humans.
A frighteningly easy process has evolved to deal with the problem.  Hákarl is simply left to rot for six to twelve weeks until it’s completely putrefied and (supposedly) ready to consume.  At Bjarnarhöfn farm, they assured us that this was done in the colder months, so that “it never goes bad.”

To get rid of the toxins, medieval Icelanders discovered that they could piece and bury the fish in sand, then let it slowly rot until most of the poison was gone.  Huge rocks were placed over the sand to press out liquid.  After unearthing the huge creatures, to preserve the meat, they let it dry in open-sided barns.  As Brynjar noted, the process was still much the same – “we never use salt,” he said, “no chemicals, no smoke, it is just pure.”  He did say that the rotting process was done in plastic now, instead of sand.  At their drying house, we could smell the sea better than the shark.  Chickens scratched in the high grass, show horses grazed in the meadows nearby.  Everything felt perfectly clean, scoured by the cool ocean breeze.

We were given a tiny taste of the hákarl, accompanied by a nibble of strong rye bread.  The taste wasn’t as extreme as some have made it out to be – it smells intensely of ammonia, but not more so than a piece of too-old cheese.  The texture was softly chewy, there was little nuance.  It’s fishy stuff, but not overpowering.  One little bite was enough, though, and we had no desire to buy ourselves a packet.  Even Hildibrandur and Brynjar admit that Icelanders only eat the stuff on special occasions, and then only in small quantities.  “It’s very healthy,” they said defensively, perhaps misunderstanding the problem.

Greenland shark have become rarer in recent years, mostly due to unintentional killing by commercial trawlers.  Because there’s not much demand for hákarl, and the fish aren’t eaten otherwise, it’s not a seriously threatened fish – but Bjarnarhöfn Farm has still given up fishing itself and relies on bycatch specimens brought to them by larger boats.  In the past, the big sharks were thrown overboard when they were caught in nets, but now they’re sometimes saved to be sold and cured.
By one of the barns, we noticed this shark’s head drying, stretched out over a plastic barrel.  The skin was rough and studded, the little teeth were less frightening than numerous.

There’s a little museum attached to the farm, where the family has displayed their collection of shark artifacts and other island curiosities.  There are fishing lines and harpoons, stuffed puffins and seals, horse yokes and seashells.  Two wooden boats take up most of the room indoors, and one wall is haphazardly arranged with shark teeth and jaws.  There were baby sharks in formaldehyde; because of the intensely cold water, the Greenland shark incubates its hatched young internally, giving birth to a live litter.
Brynjar showed us a dried patch of polar bear fur, two polar bear claws, the skull of a young whale and a very strange fish skeleton – the oddest things they’ve found in shark stomachs over the years.

Bjarnarhöfn is a beautiful place to visit, on a little triangle of green between the water and the rocky mountains, hemmed in on a third side by the Berserkjahraun (Berserkers Lavafield, in English).  Driving in, we had to stop to let a dozen horses cross the lane in front of us.
It's too bad that Iceland's most infamous specialty food is known primarily for being hard to stomach, but visiting Bjarnarhöfn it was hard not to feel a certain fondness for hákarl.  I can't say that I love it, but it is different and romantic in a certain way - Iceland is a tough landscape, with long winters and cold weather.  One can picture the older inhabitants of the farm holed up, slicing thick hunks of shark, growing to love the peculiar taste, waiting for summer and something fresher.

A Land Of Water and Wheels

The first amazing thing I saw in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a waterwheel.  We were crossing an arid valley in the south, with rocky slopes all around and a harsh, mediterranean sun beating down on the road.  From inside the bus windows it seemed impossible that there could be any crops there - but the valley bottom was covered with corn and tobacco plants.
Hydropower is an amazing thing.  Any machine, essentially, can be powered by running water - and often in a much simpler way than one would imagine.  As the bus descended into the seam of the valley, where a clear river flowed in the dust, we began passing irrigation channels and pipes. Makeshift, rough things - PVC and rusted metal - they were being supplied with water from waterwheels turning creakily in the riverbed.  No pumps, no gurgle of hoses, just old wheels lifting water up and letting gravity do the rest.  It was so beautifully, elegantly simple.  I almost asked the bus driver to stop so that I could take a picture.
In another corner of the country, we visited these much older - and just as intriguing - watermills.

Though there are plenty of hydropower plants in Bosnia, most of the waterwheels one is likely to see are of the schlocky variety.  Spinning purposelessly beside restaurants or tourist centers, the wheels seem curious at first, but they're the continuation of a long tradition.  Rivers and streams are an integral part of Bosnia - the name is actually derived from the ancient word bosana, which means water.  This is a third world country and one of the poorest in Europe, but the tap water in every faucet is not only drinkable - it's delicious and stony cold.  It comes from Bosnia's greatest resource, a collection of pristine aquifers that haven't yet been tapped for mass irrigation or drained and dirtied by urbanization.  There are springs and crystalline rivers everywhere, their flows almost impervious to drought. It's no surprise that there's also a long history of using all that water to spin wheels, grind grain, pound wool and saw wood - for hundreds of years, mills have been a part of the Bosnian landscape.

The Pliva river springs from the ground whole at Pljeva, where three underground flows bubble to the surface and run together.  The water - even at midsummer - is so cool that the forest near the source has a mountain feeling, as though an alpine breeze had somehow been trapped in the trees there.  It's a magnificent, almost magical sight; the water emerges from mossy rock so abruptly that it seems like an illusion.
Nearby, old mills stand wheel-less, with water spilling unchecked through wooden flumes.  There were more picnickers and hikers around than millers when we passed through, and a few cows grazing in unfenced meadows.  Some old stone wheels lying in the weeds were the best evidence of the town's past.

In Bosanska Krupa, a connected trio of mills juts out into the clear water of the Una river.  Now more of a tourist attraction, the waterwheels here are brightly painted and rarely used.  Nicknamed "Aleja Vodenica"("Mill Alley") the wooden vestiges have become a symbol; the platforms and pilings connect town and river, anchoring history and nature together.  If nothing else, they're pretty.

None of them are operational, but the famous cluster of mills near Jajce is still one of the most interesting and unique sites in Bosnia.  A line of cabin-like buildings in the spillway between two lakes, the mills have been maintained (if not used) since Ottoman times - some estimate that they date to the 16th century.

These small structures were an important part of the medieval Bosnian economy - Ottoman farmers brought their grain to places like this for grinding, leaving ten percent as payment. Centralized mills were common in some places, but at Jajce the small, steady rivulets were perfect for individual families to construct their own.  Even today there are close to a dozen, none larger than a shack, kept up as a cultural tribute to the past.  In truth, the Jajce watermills were used as recently as the twentieth century, and there are still people in the city that remember grinding their flour there.

It's a beautiful spot, especially on a weekend evening, when Bosnian families canoe on the lakes and barbecue in the parkland around.

The most ingenious and interesting use of hydropower we've come across in Bosnia and Herzegovina was this lamb-roasting spit at Vozač restaurant, in the Vrbas River valley.  A bored waiter let us into the roasting cabin, which was - needless to say - quite hot.  The home-made wheel was fed by a hose running from the nearby spring; a clever gear mechanism kept the meat's rotation slow and methodical.

We would have stayed for lunch, but it appeared that the creature was a few hours away from being done.  Driving away, we realized that it was the first working watermill that we'd seen since the irrigation wheels in Herzegovina - and it wasn't even connected to a river.  How wonderful, that a place would cobble something together like this, even with electricity at the ready and a local crowd that didn't care how the spit was turned.  

The Frontier: Bosnian Krajina

We came up to the Krajina trying to get out into the wilderness, lured by stories of river rafting and ancient castles.  We found the edge of Bosnia, where the country long ago mixed and bled into the world outside.
A frontier is both one thing and another.  The very meaning of the word suggests two sides, where something comes up against the unknown, or the other.  The Bosanska Krajina - or "Bosnian Frontier" - is a place where war has always been close at hand, where the people are quiet and tough, where minarets rise beside cornfields and river trout jump at flies.  This is the most beautiful and wild corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina, pushed up into the sickle of Croatia and overflowing with rivers and pretty towns.

In Banja Luka, government buildings still fly the Serbian war flag. In the northern plains and forests, Muslim farmers and loggers make up the vast majority. In 1992, the Bosanska Krajina was swept over by fighting. A quick and ugly front sprang up between towns and ruined any chance for camaraderie in the future.  The combatants - Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks - have mostly withdrawn to their own corners, creating homogenous enclaves where once there were ethnic mixes. Wounds are licked.  Life goes on.
An old name for the Krajina was the "Ljuta Krajina," or the "angry frontier."  It's been at the heart of almost every conflict fought in this part of the world: the fault line between Roman Dalmatia and the invading slavs, the grating edge between Austro-Hungaria and the Ottomans, the headquarters of the Yugoslav partisans during WWII, the bloody site of Serb concentration camps during the conflict of the nineties. War is ingrained in the landscape.

On the other hand, the area is also very peaceful, even bucolic.  Farmland abuts pine forests, there are countless woodland springs and the soft, low mountains have a sentimental resemblance to old-europe or New England.  If the people are reserved, they're also determined and hard working. Towns like Bihac, Jajce and Cazin fill up in the evening with men in from the fields and woods. Tan, broad shouldered youths drink beer in workboots and jeans, a scene that would be familiar in Oklahoma or the Hungarian Puszta.  Tractors rumble through the streets, lamb grills on roadside spits, the food is a hearty mix of grilled meats and potatoes - with some river fish mixed in.

In the dyer valleys between rivers, the land is more yellow hued and open.  To the north of Bosanki Petrovac, we drove through a long expanse of fields.  There were a few houses, but mostly they lay in ruins, shelled during the war.  Much of the land was fallow.  Shepherds huts and carts had replaced the old farms, perched high on the valleysides.  In the intense light of noon, they were like faraway glimpses of the past.  Flocks of sheep moved as one thing, spreading and contracting on the grass.  It was an empty place, where the driving was fast and straight and there were few other cars.

Several thousand Bosniaks were imprisoned, tortured and raped at the Serbian Omarska concentration camp, near the town of Prijedor.  One of the most publicized and awful outrages of the Bosnian war, Omarska was officially referred to as an "investigation center" by the Serbs who had taken control of the region - in truth, between four and five thousand people were shot, beaten or starved to death at the camp before it was shut down.  Mass graves have only partly been exhumed, the Mittal Steel company resumed operations at the town mine after the war and hasn't allowed much investigation.
Cazin, not far away from Omarska, up at the very point of the frontier, came to life in the evenings after the daily Ramazan fasting.  We ate dinner at Papillon restaurant, which served proudly national food.  A man popped in and out of the kitchen with plates and bags of cevapi. Only one other man ate in the restaurant, but there were plenty of other people waiting to bring food home.  We have stopped trying, in this land, to reconcile normalcy with horror.

This was once one of the most ethnically and religiously mixed regions of Yugoslavia, with Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosniaks and Orthodox Serbs living together somewhat peaceably.  When this was the end-point of the Ottoman Empire, the government encouraged Muslim farmers and Bosniak families to move here and create a kind of buffer against the Hungarian and Austrian lands beyond.  Later, in the 18th century, Serb herders and mercenaries came to graze sheep and fight against the northern neighbors.  The boundary changed often, allegiances broke generally along religious lines, the Krajina's culture changed much less than its boundaries.
Joseph Broz Tito, the daring young Partisan leader (and later ruler of Yugoslavia) hid his base in a cave near Dvar, in the thick of the Krajina's mountains.  Thousands of German paratroopers failed to capture him there in the embarrassingly unsuccessful Operation Rösselsprung - his escape and the Yugoslav victory helped create a legend after Tito returned.

In truth, our experience in the frontier has had little to do with bloodshed.  We've traveled here like drivers across the American west, covering large distances and letting a larger ambience sink in.  Between busy towns, there are stretches of light and shadow as the trees and plains pass and the sun rises or sinks.  We've come by lakes near Jajce, followed river canyons around Bihac, climbed winding passes through the firs.  The towns, when they appear, are pass-throughs, with sunny-walls and self-contained cultures - a whirl of gossip, wedding halls, rusty trucks and the smell of meat.  Sometimes we stop, sometimes we don't.  In Bosanski Petrovac, we parked our car at the bus station - a place even more transient, where ancient-caravan buses creaked and puttered in from the lands around.  We ate lunch at "Florida Restaurant," where the sign was very faded but the trout was perfectly fresh and tender.

As we licked ice cream in the old castle of Bosanska Krupa, looking down on the Una river, we felt satisfied that we'd made it far enough.  We had a pleasant time doing it, too.  The Bosanska Krajina is a beautiful place to come to grips with history and culture.
For us, this is also the frontier of our journey - the last push into the hinterlands of the Balkans, of southern Europe, middle Europe, wherever it is that we are.  In a few days, we'll be ensconced in Sarajevo, then headed home, then on our last leg - Scandinavia, the British Isles, places that feel especially far removed from heat and confusion, tiny cultures, bombed buildings and Turkish coffee.  We'll leave behind a tangle of roads traveled and looped, borders crossed, towns with impossible names.  This is the last foray into this particular wilderness, and, standing in the breeze atop the castle, we began to sense the end.  Fitting, probably, that this historical middle ground felt like a perfect place to finish the chapter.

Una, The One and Only

Like everything else in the Balkans, the Una river's name has a legend behind it - this one from Roman Times.  "The one and only," a foot soldier declared when spotting the river. He had never seen anything quite like it.  Even though there are 7 major rivers in Bosnia and Herzegovina and around 28 smaller ones, the Una is widely considered unique, a treasure, almost mythic. They say that it's a place of meditation and enlightenment.  We met it at the very end of the second rainstorm in two days. We'd just been thinking that the sudden, intense showers had made us feel our first real sense of "summer." Standing at the side of the Una, we had a realization, because I guess that's just what happens on this river. What had given us that familiar feeling of summer was all the green. The Northeast corner of Bosnia is a constant landscape of lush fields, and after weeks of Mediterranean climate, it felt familiar. It felt like summers throughout our lives.  And there it was, the Una River showing its powers of enlightenment right off the bat.

For most of its 132 mile length, the Una is surrounded by gorgeous, untouched nature.  It's as if people have known that if an eyesore was built by the Una's side, she'll punish them by reflecting their mistake back clearly and brightly.  The water is remarkably glassy, its reflections are a stunning study in symmetry above and below the horizon line.  It's also so so blue that when a duck glides over its surface, it's as if its tail is pulling down a zipper sewn into blue satin.  Down at the very bottom, the riverbed is smooth limestone.  Shelves of it can be seen raised up above the water in some spots, giving the river a unique and intriguing look.  It feels more like a mountain river than a valley river.  The dense forest rising up on each side, painted in the river's reflection, only adds to that feeling.  It is truly beguiling.

Fish can be seen darting around in such abundance that you feel like you could just throw a net or even a hand in and come up with a shiny, slinky fellow.  If it were only that easy.  This fishing house, set up on stilts, stands behind a roadside restaurant named "Stari Mlini," (Old Mill).  The restaurant's building, much newer, also stands in the river on stilts, between which mill wheels turn.  We'd gotten out of the car to look at it and were then distracted by wildflowers and these amazing blue dragonflies with velvety indigo wings.  Beyond them, we spotted the wooden relic out there alone.  The green river grasses have grown up at the same rate as the structure has broken down.  Even a river can sit still for a moment, this scene communicated to me.  My own little lesson from the Una, from which Bosniaks have been drawing inspiration and wisdom for centuries.

Young couples sit on the banks, staring in to see how good they look together.  Maybe they drop a pebble in to distort the reflection, so the rings of their two faces move in toward one another.  To see what their children would look like.  This young boy came to shore in his skiff, using a thick stick as a paddle.  His two friends stood on a bridge above him, poking fun at his makeshift oar.  This isn't to say that the locals' relationship with the Una is purely serene, contemplative, laid-back.  Rafting is exceedingly popular and big, heavylooking rafts were strung upside-down to the tops of vans that past by.  We saw one red tray carrying a sixpack of yellow helmets cruise by, but were a few days too late for the big spectacle that is the annual Una Regatta. 

Thousands of participants from here and abroad take to the water in rafts, canoes and kayaks, conquering the many waterfalls along the Una's course. It is a non-competitive "race" that takes 3-5 days. It's a celebration of the river, a bowing down to its powers and probably just a really great time. We went to Bihać to inquire about the event, and were welcomed by a sign that read "Bihać: A City in Love with the River."  There would be no point in specifying which one.  The river is the Una, here and throughout Northeast Bosnia and Herzegovina.  She loves this country as much as it loves her - which can only be assumed by the way she keeps bending toward it.  For most of the Una's length, the river runs right along the border of Croatia and Bosnia.  At three different points, though, it deviates from this clear path and curves in to the nation that adores it so much.  Bihać is situated at one of these points, a very pleasant, small city/large town with short, simple bridges arching over the river and picnic tables, parks and cafes edged up to the waterside.

Many say that the people of Bihać are the most ecologically minded Bosniaks in the country.  So, they don't just profess their love of the river, they really let it guide their decisions.  Which is wonderful.  Unlike other beautiful bodies of water we've visited recently, the underwater inhabitants of the Una are not currently at a risk of endangerment.  While fly-fishing is a popular recreational activity and fishing is touted as a unique tourist experience, the licensing system is responsible.  Unska pastrmka (Una river trout) are widely available on riverside menus, but larger species like carp and the prized grayling are left more to the fishermen themselves. Let them eat carp!  I'm happy with pastrmka. The trout of the Una happen to be uniformly plump, pink-fleshed and delicately flavored.  Trout is something that carries a huge dose of terroir and you can taste the purity of the Una.  No muddiness or earthiness, these trout taste like crystal blue water.

In Bosanska Krupa, we came across the young boy pictured earlier while walking across a wood-planked bridge, trying to get a nice photo of the three yellow, red-roofed houses set on stilts above mills.  Their placement is at the end of a mini peninsula, their surrounds are wholly water.  Across the way, a castle sits atop a hill.  Old guns, painted blue, point down directly at the quaint trio, an unfortunate coincidence.  On the other side of the hill is an amazing sight. A mosque, a Catholic church and an Orthodox church stand literally side by side, or at least across the street from one another.  Following the waters for a few days, visiting it at one spot or another, letting it speak to me like the locals told me to, I really felt that the wide expanse of the river right at this point had to do with that successful coexistence.   There's just something very magical about the Una. 

Castle Hunting: Ostrožac

Ostrožac castle's been used recently.  That much is clear from the bullet holes in the plaster, the burnt window frames, the shelling holes punched in the walls.  It's not often that one comes across a castle that hasn't outlived its purpose.
The surrounding fields are bucolic enough, like many green pastures around many old fortresses.  There is an abandoned bar on the road below the castle, an old sign on the roof is painted luridly with women in lingerie.  A man chopped wood nearby, his young children kicked a soccer ball.  It made us think, in some ways, about the periods of peace and warfare that every castle went through.  In so much of Europe, that peace has extended now into a kind of permanence that belies millennia of turbulence.  Here in Bosnia, the very quiet - an evening calm, with soft light and chirping insects - seemed to clang against recent violence.

Perched at the edge of a shelf-like plateau, overlooking the pine trees and steep slopes of the Una River valley, Ostrožac is a long, low-walled fortress with two distinct ends and a few intermediary towers on the less steep side.  The gatehouse and keep are fairly standard, with thick-built, mid-medieval style defenses and little nuance.  These are classic designs, much used.  This part is mostly ruined but - as is the way of dense stone - it has held its basic shape and not crumbled much.      This is a rocky, remote corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina, nearby to the provincial town of Cazin, but not to much else.
The first surprise is the sculpture garden in the grounds.  There are some two dozen (maybe more) large carvings, all probably done by one artist who liked to experiment with styles.  Some of the pieces are better than others, none have any information by them, none of it seems to be maintained.  In fact, the whole castle is wild feeling and, in all practical terms, unattended - though the grass had been cut sometime recently.

It's always a thrill to feel as though you have the run of the place, and never more so than when there are obvious dangers.  In some castles, everything is fenced-off or protected by guardrails.  Even the most solidly built ramparts are usually off limits, to say nothing of already caved-in floors and rooms with collapsed walls.
At Ostrožac, we were free to wander everywhere - on the narrow battlements, on the very tops of the walls, into the unmarked bowels of the keep.  We clambered and climbed and pleaded with one another to be careful.  It's not for the faint of heart, but the views and experience are both worth the danger.
Sometimes, we find castles like this.  But nothing we've visited has been like the residence part of Ostrožac.

On the far end of the compound, in the most protected and steepest-sided part of the walls, the later Austro-Hungarian owners of the castle built a small, ornate residence during the last throws of their conflict with the Ottomans.  It's a place built more for show than defense, with fanciful turrets and intricate moldings.
There isn't much grandeur left.  This probably wasn't the hardest hit section of the complex during the most recent conflict, but the lighter-weight construction didn't hold up well against bombardment.  The walls were better for graffiti, the floors easily rotted, glass windows broke.  The centuries have treated the stone walls outside better, the old keep still holds its squat shape - this newer part looks like it has been part of a war.  One can still see the remnants of the older walls where the newer material has fallen away, the original framework of the building set in stone.

We explored this waste of cave-ins and scrawl for a while, putting our feet down carefully and counting bulletholes (too many to count, really).  It still seemed surprising that we were even allowed into this part of the castle.  From outside, it looks normal enough - though some of the turrets do lilt and the rooflines aren't all plumb.
It's almost impossible to tell exactly what kind of fighting went on here, but that's nothing unusual - the marks of war are just more recent than in other castles, but the stories are similarly cloudy.  The 1990's were a while ago now, most people here don't like to recount what happened or where.

The castle's earliest form dates to the thirteenth century, but its present shape was mainly formed in the sixteenth century, as the Ottomans were trying to shore up the northwestern reaches of their empire.  They picked a solid bit of slope where the land rose and flattened.  The rise of land that the walls fortify is most easily accessed at only one point, and this is where the original fortifications were built up the strongest.  There are rounded walls enclosing thick inner tower structures.  A long, stone ramp - presumably for cannons to be hauled in - was attached at some point, but doesn't look original.  There were remains of several bonfires inside, and lots of broken glass.  The rough, surviving chambers were in surprisingly good shape.

Later, the Austro-Hungarians took Ostrožac and saw something of a frontier post in it.  At the time, mountain fortresses had mostly been made moot by heavy weaponry, but the symbolism was still important.  The act of restoration - putting their architectural claim on an enemy's castle - was probably done as much to impress the locals as fend off gunmen from Ankara.  In fact, the initial thrust of Austro-Hungarian ownership here came about by semi-forcible annexation, not by direct military action.  The Bosnian "acquisition" was one of the pre-cursors of the first world war, though it occurred in 1878.  At the time, the Ottoman empire was reeling from an extended conflict with Russia, and had little chance to defend itself from the takeover - because the new Habsburg owners of Ostrožac hadn't won it by force, they may have felt that renovations were especially needed to set themselves apart from the previous owners.

Ostrožac is a great castle to visit, perhaps the most whole and impressive in all of Bosnia and Herzegovina.  It's remote, of course, in a far-flung part of the country that is deeply cut by river gorges; the going is slow around here, the roads twist and follow old topographical curves.  But, to find this castle in the pine forests and cornfields is to find a place that feels immediately powerful and multi-faceted.  The older walls are fun in themselves, the sculpture gardens add a bit of intrigue and interest, the marks of recent conflict make it unique.  The landscape is beautiful too, with little towns and minarets outlined in the distant hillsides and thick forests below.  We left feeling as though we'd explored something unlike anything else we'd seen - a place that felt as recently used as it did old and deserted, as though a wave of something ancient had just passed through before us.

Njeguši, The Rough Heart of Montenegrin Food

To get to Njeguši from Kotor, you have to drive about an hour.  It's funny, because you can see Kotor right from the outer limits of Njeguši - it's somewhere down below, several thousand feet in the low distance.
This is a mountain town, in a high patch of somewhat flat land just behind the precipitous rock wall that plunges to the sea.  It's not a big place - there are just a few houses in a clump, surrounded by close-cropped fields and rough stone.  But this is the heart of Montenegrin food, a place where hundreds of ham hocks and cheese rinds sit in cool cellars, safe from the summer heat.  The local pršut (which others might call prosciutto) and semi-hard cheese are gustatory experiences, the point of food travel in Montenegro.

Montenegro, like any new country, has had to define what its national foods will be.  The problem is, this is a small place with lots of influence from its neighbors, decades of rule by Serbia, and cuisine that looks... familiar.  There are lots of the same grilled squids and blitva plates that we've seen before in Croatia; bureks, which every Balkan country eats; roasted octopus; cuttlefish risotto; lamb; ajvar, which is also popular in Macedonia and Serbia; and cured meats and cheeses. Cured meats and cheese shouldn't be considered a Montenegrin specialty - more a European specialty in general.  But the pride that this country takes in Njeguši's products is immense.
The town itself is a pretty, high-up place in a mountain bowl.  Around it is the protected wilderness of Lovćen National Park, where cattle roam the steep slopes and wildflowers peek out from crags.  The road up from the coast is a long tangle of switchbacks and hairpins, with views down over the bay and out to the Adriatic.  It's a narrow lane - not really wide enough for two-way traffic.  There's lots of backing up and careful maneuvering, lots of cars stopped to take pictures, frustrated truck drivers.

At the Kotor market, far below, we had seen wheels and wheels of the cheese and bought some for ourselves.  The women who sold us our wedges pointed out different types - sheep, cow's milk, mixes, new cheeses, washed-rinds.  The most famous type of Njeguški sir ("сир" in Serbo-Croat, meaning cheese) is jarred up, sliced, in olive oil - the oil helps protect it from the awful summer heat.  We didn't buy any of that particular type, deciding to save our arteries the affront of cheese in oil, but have tasted it.  It's not bad.  Very much like most semi-firm cheeses.

During our meander through Njeguši, we were invited into one couple's smoke house.  The air was heavily smokey, the rafters were black.  Behind the hams, brown paper had been hung and grease-spotted.  It was cooler there, and the man who showed it to us was proud.  He spoke only Serbian, so we couldn't talk much, but we got the gist.
Driving in Njeguši is like a slow trip through a specialty foods store.  Signs at every house point to cheese and pršut, honey and rakija.  Men and women sit outside, in what shade they can find, and wave invitingly at passing tourists.  There are a few restaurants dishing up heavy, mountain food - lamb is popular - and lots of parked cars with foreign plates.

The cheese is good, with a flavor range that travels from mild to tangy without ever reaching strong.  It's tasty, alpine style cheese, aged only a little and tasting more of grass than barnyard. We've liked the sheep's milk cheeses the best (the one on the right was a delicious example), but the cow's milk varieties are great too - generally milder though, and softer.

The pršut is also great.  The Montenegrins like it thick-sliced and strong-flavored.  It's very smokey and woody, with salty channels of fat and a soft consistency.  This isn't the harder, tougher stuff you might find packaged in a supermarket, it's actually pretty delicate in consistency.
Montenegrin food is much like other cuisines in that the country's chefs love to stuff and smother dishes with cheese and ham.  On menus, one might find that the english translation for a specialty is such-and-such "cordon bleu," while the Montenegrin title calls the same thing "Njeguški."  Even if the cheese and ham is from the supermarket, the preparation and the sentiment is from the mountains.

Before we left Njeguši, we bought a few more things - a jar of dark honey that, when we tasted it, seemed to be flavored somehow with fruit; and a small plastic bottle (unmarked) of vile, very strong, root-flavored rakija.  The liquor tasted a lot like a headache, but was fine with some blueberries and lime.  The honey is a strange complement to coffee, but is good on toast.  Neither product would have us coming back to town anytime soon, but they're not really the point - only some jars and flasks to fill in the margins of the flesh and dairy.
There is a story, perhaps untrue, about a famous sculptor who, in the 1950's, was commissioned to create some sculptures for Lovćen National Park.  Passing Njeguši on his way up and down from the site, he fell in love with the town and its flavors.  When he negotiated his payment with the government, he asked not to be paid in money - but in Njeguški pršut and sir.