The Bay of Kotor is an inlet on the coast of Montenegro that twists 28 kilometres inland through four linked bays under bare karst mountains, with Venetian stone towns on its shores and a fortress wall climbing the slope above the old town of Kotor like a stone seam. Everyone calls it a fjord, and it is not one: no glacier ever reached this coast, and the bay is a drowned river valley, though the mountains dropping straight into the water make the mistake easy. Kotor sits at the innermost end, a walled town of medieval lanes with no straight line to follow, where alleys open without warning onto small stone squares and Romanesque churches, and the walls rise from it up the mountainside for 1,350 steps to the fortress of St John, 260 metres above the roofs, with the whole bay below in the evening. Venice held the town for four centuries, and the lion of St Mark is on the gate.
Across the water lies Perast, a Baroque captains' town of stone palaces and two tall bell towers lining a quay barely a few streets deep, from which small boats cross to Our Lady of the Rocks, the only man-made island in the Adriatic, built up stone by stone over five centuries by sailors who sank old ships and dropped rocks on a reef where an icon had been found; the church on it holds an embroidered icon whose threads include the maker's own hair, dark at the start of the work and grey by the end. In 1698 Peter the Great sent young Russian noblemen to this bay to learn how to command a ship, and the bay's sailors served every navy of the Mediterranean. The coast road hugs the whole shoreline, threading fishing villages and stone chapels with the mountains beside the water, and boats run through the narrow straits to coves the road never reaches. The Bay of Kotor is a sea that went looking for the mountains, and the towns were built where it stopped.