Ninety seconds on Old Bridge of Rijeka Crnojevića
A village of eighty four people has a two arched stone bridge through the middle of it, which is what a former capital looks like once the trade has gone. The restaurants at either end are why the stop runs longer.
In 1853 Prince Danilo commissioned the arched stone bridge over the river, raising it in memory of his father Stanko Petrović and in place of the wooden crossing his predecessor had built. It still carries the centre of the village.
Two arches of local limestone over slow green water. The village either side of it was Montenegro's capital and its busiest river port, and the reflection of the arches in the still water is what the place is photographed for after the bend above it. Restaurants have taken the ground floors on both banks, which makes this the best lunch stop inside the national park and the reason a ten minute bridge becomes an hour.
The Crnojevic family moved here after the Ottomans took Zabljak Crnojevica in 1478, and the village they founded became the capital and the seat of the press that printed the first books in southeastern Europe. The port trade and the printing both went. The bridge outlasted them, and the population has fallen from about a thousand in the nineteen sixties to eighty four.
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