My Podgorica Biking Circuit

Until daylight savings time snuffed the sun so early in the evenings, I looked forward to cycling with a bunch of other expats every Tuesday into the hills and mountains outside Podgorica. This was a great way to see something of the country outside of the city without having a car. Fortunately, Montenegro is so scenic and variably terrained that even a short excursion from the city offers much.

One of our more frequent circuits took us along a scenic river, into the farmland, up a few steep hills, and past some very interesting Roman ruins. Let me share the journey:


First, we wind alongside the azure-green waters of the Moraca river.


We cross a bridge over one of its more turbulent rapids. One of these days I need to get a kayak!


We cycle a while through the farms outskirting Podgorica. The gentle green fields soon give way to steep, rocky hills and cliffs. These, though challenging, are actually a welcome relief after the several inevitable encounters with the rabid, horse-sized dogs these farmers tend to keep.


After coursing through the hills a while longer, the circuit brings us to these Roman ruins. A village skirts the outer walls of these crumbling mortars, and often shepherds and cowherds send their flocks to graze amongst the ancient walls. Although small and in disrepair, I find the decrepit state of these ruins inspiring. Rather than having been built up and zoned off from the populace, these ruins maintain their ancient legacy that much better just because they are so unkempt and rustic. They are a fixture of the landscape, a timeless pile of assembled stones that have kept their vigil while empires rose and fell around them, while villages blossomed about, and countless generations of shepherds sent their sheep to graze between its walls.


The ruins are of a Roman town called Doclea, once a small but important urban center of the Dukjla State. Erected in the first century AD, the town was protected both by its high walls and two intersecting rivers that formed a natural moat. It boasted a forum, several temples, a triumphal arch, and (erected centuries later) two Christian basilicas. The town fell several times, at the hands of invading Goths and the tremors of earthquakes, before being finally leveled by the Slavs in 620. It is remarkable that, after so long, so many of the structures remain today.






Finally, along the Moraca river again, we cycle into the sunset homewards. Perhaps a dinner of deep-fried cordon bleu and veal rolls, washed down by several bottles of Niksicko beer, awaits us at the restaurant we head to afterwards, tasty though bound to undo any healthy gains we may have achieved in our kilometers of cycling. Still, such concerns are trivial. After all, its the company and the adventure that count.