Ninety seconds on Archaeological Museum of Budva
Four floors, and the archaeology stops after the third. Almost everything in the first three came out of the ground within walking distance of the door, which is the argument for going in rather than reading a board outside.
Small but well-curated museum in Budva Old Town housing Greek, Roman, and medieval artifacts recovered locally, including coins, pottery, and sculptural fragments from the Hellenistic period.
Over four hundred square metres, and the building is read from the bottom up. The first three floors are the archaeology, running from the Illyrians through the Greek and Roman town to the Slavic one, and the objects are almost all local: grave goods out of the necropolises immediately outside the walls, Hellenistic pottery, coins, the Illyrian helmets that are the collection's signature. The fourth floor changes register entirely into the town's later cultural history, with an ethnographic collection of fishing gear, household objects and navigation instruments beside it. It opened in 2003 and took a conservation award in London two years later, which is visible in the building as much as in the cases.
The necropolises that supply most of the first three floors sit under the modern town. The one outside the land gate alone held close to five hundred graves and was in use from the fifth century BC.
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