ABSTRACT
In 1904, Mary Durham described Cetinje as a ‘little red-roofed town, a village city, a kindergarten capital, one of the quaintest sights in Europe, so tiny, so entirely wanting in the usual stock properties of a big town and yet so consciously a capital’. The English traveloguer’s compounding of the disparate terms ‘village’ and ‘city’, ‘kindergarten’ and ‘capital’ reveals not only the writer’s penchant for ironic flair but also something fundamental about the capital of Montenegro at the turn of the twentieth century. The settlement of just 3,000 was, in fact, both the size of a village and ‘consciously a capital’. The local pride of that place so keenly aware of its minuscule size and ‘consciously’ cultivating its identity as ‘a capital’ is palpable in a history written by Pavle Apolonovič Rovinski, a Russian national who lived in Montenegro for a quarter of a century. Rovinski (1889) accounts for the ‘little town’ of Cetinje’s singular ability to command ‘the rapt attention of the entire world’ and ‘play such an important political role’ by turning to ‘the glorious history of Montenegro and the particular spirit of its people and rulers’.
