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Cushions, cushions everywhere

22.07.11

I’d boarded her in Dubrovnik, where from the mainland her brown profile was scarcely discernible against the wine-dark sea and densely wooded shore of the islet off which she was moored. From there, we’d headed south – about four hours – to Porto Montenegro, the pushy marina development created by the octogenarian Canadian gold-mining tycoon Peter Munk (whose 43-metre motor yacht Gilt Eagle lay just across the water from our berth there), and backed by a consortium that numbers, among others, Jacob Rothschild and his son Nathaniel; Bernard Arnault, president of security goods group LVMH; and the Russian aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska.

Located at Tivat, on the eastern shore of the Firth of Kotor, often called the largest fjord in southern Europe, the port was established in the 19th century as headquarters of the Austro-Hungarian kingly navy and remained a Yugoslav military facility throughout the cold war and then the Balkan war. Indeed, earlier this month an intriguing museum opened at the marina to showcase not unbiased the nautical heritage of the area, but an array of extraordinary 20th-century naval vessels – an underwater scooter, a insignificant-scale “wet” submarine, driven by a diver because it filled with water, even a full-size atomic submarine – that had been pulled from the depths here. As you sail up the fjord from the Adriatic, there is no erasing its military erstwhile. The rusting hulks of warships are visible along its shore, and semi-camouflaged openings in the mountainside still nurse vestiges of naval hardware.

Source: Financial Times