What decides a visit to Ostrog is the hour you arrive. Entry is free and so is parking, but the parking is tiered and which tier you get depends on the clock. There is a large lot at the lower monastery, an intermediate one above it, and a small shaded lot near the top of the walking path. In summer the top lot is reported full by around ten, after which arrivals are turned back down to walk up.
Arriving before nine means five minutes on foot. Arriving later can mean three quarters of an hour. Midday in July and August is the worst time to come, for the queue and the heat together, and a weekday morning in May, June, September or October buys the same site with a fraction of the line.
Two other things will turn you away. Shoulders and knees must be covered, for men, women and children, and it is enforced at the gate; accounts differ on whether a wrap is handed out there or has to be bought from the stalls lower down, and there is nowhere on site to change, so arrive dressed. And the published opening hours contradict each other, so treat the church interiors as closing in the middle of the afternoon. Arriving later than that means seeing the ledge and the view but not the reliquary.
Getting up is the part travellers talk about most. The turn is at Bogetići on the M-3 between Podgorica and Nikšić, and from there it is about ten kilometres of switchbacks. The surface is paved and the corners are mostly protected. Width is the issue: there are stretches that take one vehicle, blind bends, and short cuttings through rock that admit a single car. What makes it hard is meeting a coach coming down in July.
The road continuing down the Danilovgrad side towards Ždrebaonik is wider and newer, so anyone uneasy about exposure should plan to use it in at least one direction. Podgorica is about fifty kilometres away and under an hour by car, and its airport is the obvious arrival. Tivat suits anyone combining Ostrog with the coast. From Budva it is an hour and a half, and from Kotor two to two and a half hours each way, which is a long day out for a site that takes one to two hours.
The footpath disposes of the parking question entirely. From the lower monastery a shaded, stony track climbs two to three kilometres to the upper, taking most people between half an hour and an hour; the road between the two levels is about five kilometres. Walking it is also how a large share of the pilgrims arrive.
Ostrog has its own halt on the standard-gauge line between Nikšić and Podgorica, and the train from Podgorica takes a little under an hour. A marked trail climbs from the halt through woods, reaching the lower monastery in an hour or more and the upper in two to two and a half, for perhaps five hundred metres of ascent. The waymarking gives out in places, the halts are usually unstaffed, there are shepherd dogs, and in summer there are snakes on the warm stones. Check the timetable, and give the whole day to it.
What happens on the ledge is the same sequence every day, and in July it takes an hour. Visitors come up the stair and join a line running along the terrace wall under a rig of blue umbrellas put up for shade. A kiosk sells candles and has a queue of its own. At the entrance to the shrine stand wooden baskets for gifts.
The line moves through the low door, past a priest who gives a short blessing and holds out a cross to be kissed, to the casket where Basil's body lies under embroidered cloths, and then out again briskly, because the terrace is full behind them. Most women cover their heads. Chanting carries across the stone through loudspeakers, and photography inside both churches is not allowed.
What people leave in the baskets is food, soap, blankets and folded clothing.
Some pilgrims walk up from the lower monastery, and a few of those cover the last stretch barefoot or on their knees. Serbian devotional sources call this a zavjet, a personal vow, and say plainly that it is not a rule. It is done by a visible minority, mostly around the feast, and the great majority of visitors, Montenegrins included, drive to the upper car park. In the warm months pilgrims stay overnight, and thin mattresses are laid out in and around the upper courtyard for them.
Ostrog is generally described as the most visited pilgrimage site in the Serbian Orthodox Church, though how many people come is not actually known. Published figures run from over a hundred thousand to 1.2 million a year and none of them is audited; the widely repeated 1.2 million entered circulation through a 2013 interview given by a party to a dispute over church property. Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim visitors all come here, a reputation the site has held for a long time.
On 12 May, Basil's feast, the site runs at capacity. Balkan Insight reported around two thousand people setting out from Podgorica two days ahead to walk roughly forty kilometres, joined overnight and the next day by thousands more from elsewhere in Montenegro and the region. The police reorganise the local road for it, running traffic one way only, from the monastery towards Ždrebaonik. Anyone whose interest in Ostrog is architectural rather than devotional should stay away on those two days. The second patronal feast, the Presentation of the Theotokos, falls on 4 December.
What the queue is filing past is worth knowing before you reach it. At Ostrog the frescoes sit on the rock. In the upper of the two cave churches the seventeenth-century painter known as master Radul worked onto the stone of the cavity itself and onto the south wall, following the bulges and hollows rather than levelling them first. The images are on living stone, not on a built church.
The site is two openings in a limestone face, a white front closing them off, a stair, and a terrace narrow enough to queue along in single file. Both doorways are low enough that visitors bow to get through, and the chamber holding the reliquary takes four to six people at a time.
Almost all of the upper monastery burned on the night of 1 to 2 June 1923. The caves came through, because rock does not burn, and so did the frescoes and the relics inside them. The rebuild ran to 1926, to a design by the Russian emigre architect Vladimir Sukurenko, paid for by King Aleksandar Karađorđević and the government of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The whitewashed storeys stacked under the overhang in every photograph date from then. The lower monastery was untouched.
The community is older than the fire by two and a half centuries. Vasilije Jovanović, born at Mrkonjići in Herzegovina in December 1610, served as a bishop there and came to this cliff in the 1660s, where hermits were already using the caves. An inscription over the inner door of the cave church of the Holy Cross dates it to 1665 and its completion to 1667, and Radul's frescoes to the same year: St Sava, St Basil, and scenes from the life of Christ, worked around the shape of the rock.
Basil died at Ostrog in April 1671 and was venerated as a saint locally, without any dated act of canonisation. Both cave churches are in the upper monastery. The lower monastery's church is the Holy Trinity, dated 1824, and beside its car park stands the church of St Stanko the Martyr, built in 2004 and named for a shepherd boy whom tradition holds Ottoman troops killed in 1712 for refusing to say where Basil's relics had been hidden.
The site exists because the rock dissolves. Ostroška greda is a limestone ridge on the western side of the Zeta valley, where the Dinaric mountains break towards the Adriatic, and water has spent a long time hollowing cavities and overhangs into its face. The monastery moved into openings that were already there, on a ledge at around 850 metres with no level ground and no easy approach.
Bring what you need with you. There is no restaurant and nothing worth calling a shop, the nearest reliable food is back down on the approach roads, the toilets draw complaints, and water matters particularly to anyone walking up. The lower monastery keeps simple pilgrim dormitories, segregated by sex, for a donation and with an early start, and they will be full around 12 May. Hotel Sokoline sits about 1,500 metres from the lower monastery on the Ždrebaonik road, with terraces facing the cliff.