ABSTRACT
Montenegro (Black Mountain) is a very small country with a land area of 13,812 square kilometres – only 5.7 per cent of the size of the UK or 2.5 per cent of the size of France. At the time of the 2003 census, it had only 616,000 inhabitants. Montenegro is as mountainous as its name implies. According to an old Montenegrin ballad, ‘When God finished making the world, He found that he had a great many rocks left in His bag; so He tumbled the whole lot on to a wild and desolate bit of country – and that is how Montenegro was formed’ (Darby 1968: 73). Limestone (karst) scenery makes up large parts of the terrain, which bears an uncanny resemblance to ‘apple crumble’ and gives rise to widespread aridity, as most surface water disappears (sooner or later) down ‘swallow-holes’ into subterranean caverns, lakes and rivers. Although much of Montenegro is breathtakingly beautiful and has immense potential for tourism, it was one of the poorer and less industrialized parts of the SFRY. It accounted for 5.4 per cent of the land area and 3 per cent of the population but only 2 per cent of the GMP of the SFRY in 1989, when Montenegro’s per capita GMP was roughly 73 per cent of the Yugoslav average (EEN, 1995, vol. 9, no. 10, p. 4).
