Nowhere in the world can you find  the country like Montenegro. There are countries bigger and wealthier but none is described by the name itself. Kings used to call their country by the name which signified its essence. Montenegro used to be monarchy and that was at the time when monarchies and big imperies were vanishing, when their names were being forgotten, and when they were getting into the world of fairy tales and legends. It was only Montenegro that remained to testify that the fairy tale beauty contained in the secret of the name never disappeared.

The Montenegrins have always walked proudly, with the look aimed upwards, above the peaks of Lovcen and Durmitor. Their aspirations are bigger than the mountains, they are like the longing for knowledge which, even in the Middle Ages, made them accept the innovations of the modern time yet to come and  bring them into their own country. It is said that when Guthenberg invented printing works, the Montenegrin prince Ivan Crnojevic brought it on his own back during his return to Montenegro.

The Montenegrins even had the writer Petar Petrovic Njegos to rule the country much earlier than it became modern to have intellectuals involved into politics. When he died, he was burried on the top of Lovcen, so that everybody could admire him and so that everybody would be shown the way towards the heaven, as it was exactly the case with sharpened domes of big europian cathedrals which are so close to the sky. In their history the Montenegrins defended their country from the Ottoman invasion, so they melted lead from the printing works into bullets, but there are some stories which say that after these victorious battles they again turned it into models and letters. I do know where this is true or not but legends are not there to tell the truth.    And they often hide some other stories. I am sure that the adjective within the name  of a country lives in the soul of its nation, but since there are countries without such an adjective there are also nations who do not make any difference between the moral and beautiful. Everywhere are these two senses different from each other, but in Montenegro they represent two expressions for one and the same thing. And for me this, more than any legend, shows the way towards the trouth about one nation. I came  into Montenegro like an adult entering the garden of his childhood. It seemed to me that I could measure it step by steps as I had measured the quarters of my hometown. I exactly knew how many steps I had to make to come from my house to school and from the Kosevo stadium, or from cinema to place chosen for the first dates. So I measured Montenegro, too, without taking its measurements. And that was not so becouse it was a small country. My father  used to say that if Yugoslavia were ironed it would be larger and bigger than the Soviet Union.The same can be applied to Montenegro.

If you look at this country from the sea, you seem to be hearing Kant's words: “Tragedy releases the feeling of sublimation”. That is the feeling arising in you when you look at Lovcen from Kotor. It seems to me too, that from St. Stefan to peaks of Durmitor and Black Lake there is eternity to walk: two beauties are merged in the poetry of Crnjanski, the  glaciers of Greenland approach to warm sandy coves of Southern seas. Everything is merged in Montenegro, while making strange contrasts, everything is entangled tinily, and grandiosly, like in the childhood memories when reality seems to be glittering full if vivid colours.

The story about Montenegro is also the story of its people with wits and virtues. As Njegos used to fascinate the nobility of europian courts, so it is today when the sports heroes fascinate milions of the public, the giants of basketball are still, even today, born in Boka Kotorska, at the sea or in the Montenegrin mountains. The state team of Yugoslavia cannot be imagined without Montenegrin footballers, not can any great club be without their young tallents. And this is only one part of story about this country. That is so becouse lacal stories, fairy tales and legends interweave. When Dejan Savicevic in the Champion Cup final in Athens, where Milan beat Barselona 4:0, dribbled past an opponent player, he did it as if he had come down from Vojo Stanic's painting, using the unpredictable path along the diagonals born on the same place where the genius of this great painter was. Witty grandmothers travelling in eggshell on Stanic's paintings as well as Dejan Savicevic's balls, completely inconprehensible for the goal-keeper of the opponent team.

When overwhelmed by grief I escorted the coffin with my father in it to his final trip to the cemetery in Herceh Novi, with the look lost somewhere in the distant sea horisont, I thought that he been killed by the misfortune of a country, our country which disappeared in that very 1992. While the dry branches of pinetrees were cracling in a long silence of steps, I knew that death could be consalation and that he would rest in peace here. I had the feeling of reawakening, rebirth. What I and my father used to love in the lost country will live here in Montenegro.