Ninety seconds on Herceg Novi Old Town
The stairs are the town, and which end they are met from decides the afternoon. From the fortress at the top everything is a descent; from the seafront it is the climb the place is nicknamed for.
Stairs and terraces carry the old town up from the water. Tvrtko I of Bosnia founded it in 1382, Forte Mare on the shore dates from that founding, the Kanli Kula above it went up under Ottoman rule, and the clock tower between the two squares is Ottoman work of 1667. The town is nicknamed for its steps.
Two fortresses and a gate between them, arranged vertically. Kanli Kula is the upper one, a sixteenth century Ottoman stronghold whose name is Turkish for blood tower and which doubled as a brutal prison; its interior is now an open air theatre. Below it the clock tower stands as a passage between the town's two squares, its four sides carrying the dials of old mechanical clocks. Below that the stepped lanes drop past churches and exploding bougainvillea to Forte Mare, a fourteenth century edifice on the water looking straight out at the mouth of the bay. The town is known as the town of a hundred thousand and one steps, and two or three hours does all of it downhill.
The Ottomans took the town in 1481 and held it for two centuries, and Kanli Kula and the clock tower on the square are what they left. Spain held it for a single year in the 1530s and put the fort on the hill above. Venice came in 1687 and Austria in 1798. Each of them fortified rather than replaced, which is why a town this size carries forts at three separate heights.
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