Podgorica is the capital of Montenegro and, for many travellers, the gateway to the country: flights land here, the international train from Belgrade stops here, and buses leave from here for the mountains and the coast. It isn't a postcard town like Kotor or a beach resort like Budva; it's a modern, functional and largely rebuilt capital, with a turbulent history that explains how it looks.
Flattened by bombing in the Second World War, the city was reborn as Titograd in socialist Yugoslavia, with wide avenues and blocky architecture, and got its historic name, Podgorica, back in 1992. Today it mixes the Ottoman legacy of the old Stara Varoš quarter, beside the Ribnica river, with contemporary landmarks such as the Millennium Bridge and the large Orthodox Cathedral of the Resurrection, plus parks along the Morača and a very Balkan café culture.
This guide helps you make the most of Podgorica for what it is: a comfortable, inexpensive capital to travel from. We tell you what to see on a half-day walk, how the airport, train and buses work, and how to organise trips from here to Ostrog, Lake Skadar, Cetinje and the mountainous north.
The area has been inhabited since antiquity: the Roman city of Doclea (Duklja) stood here, and its ruins survive on the outskirts. In the Middle Ages it was a frontier stronghold and, under Ottoman rule from the 15th century, it grew as Podgorica beside the rivers. It became part of Montenegro in 1878. Bombing in the Second World War destroyed it almost completely; rebuilt as the capital of the Yugoslav republic under the name Titograd (1946-1992), it took back the name Podgorica and is now the capital of independent Montenegro. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Montenegrin heartland: Cetinje, the old royal capital at the foot of Lovćen; Ostrog Monastery clinging to a cliff; Podgorica, the modern capital; and Lake Skadar, the largest in the Balkans.
Read the history of The historic interior (Cetinje, Ostrog) →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Podgorica existed, one of the most important cities of the Adriatic hinterland stood on this plain where the Zeta, Morača and Ribnica rivers meet: Doclea. Founded in the 1st century AD on a settlement of the Illyrian tribe of the Docleatae, Doclea (or Duklja) grew into a prosperous Roman city of several thousand people, with a forum, baths, basilicas, temples, an aqueduct and walls. It stood where routes between the Adriatic coast and the Balkan interior crossed, which made it a hub for trade and administration.
As the Empire became Christian, Doclea gained early Christian basilicas and became the seat of a bishopric. But the city suffered the upheavals at the end of the ancient world. Earthquakes, the crisis of the Empire and the invasions of peoples such as the Avars and the Slavs in the 6th and 7th centuries finally ruined it. Its people scattered, and the stones of old Doclea were left strewn across the fields, where you can still see them today.
The name Doclea, however, survived. It gave rise to 'Duklja', which in the Early Middle Ages was the name of the first Slavic state in this region, a principality that in the 11th and 12th centuries was the historical seed of what, much later, would become Montenegro. So the ruins you can visit today on the outskirts of Podgorica are not just a Roman site: they are where the country's name and its oldest memory of statehood began. The modern capital stands, quite literally, next to its own origins.
After Doclea declined, settlement shifted slightly. In the Middle Ages there was a settlement called Ribnica in this riverside area, mentioned in connection with the Serbian Nemanjić dynasty. In fact, tradition places the birth of Stefan Nemanja, founder of that powerful medieval house, here. The site, where roads and river fords crossed, kept its strategic value through the centuries.
The name 'Podgorica' is first recorded in 1326, in the archives of the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). It means roughly 'below the little hill' (pod = below; gorica = little hill), referring to Gorica hill, which overlooks the city. As a trading post on the route between the coast and the interior, Podgorica thrived as a market town.
In 1474 the city fell to the Ottoman Empire, which held it for more than four centuries. The Ottomans fortified it and gave it its Eastern character: they built a fortress, mosques, a clock tower (the Sahat kula) and the maze of lanes in the quarter now called Stara Varoš ('old town'), on the banks of the Ribnica. Podgorica was a frontier stronghold of the Empire facing the untamed Montenegro of the mountains, whose capital, Cetinje, held out up in the heights. For centuries, the city on the plain and the country of the crags lived in opposite worlds, divided by the front line between the Crescent and the Cross.
Podgorica's fate changed in 1878. After the Montenegrin-Ottoman wars and the Turkish defeat, the Congress of Berlin recognised Montenegro's independence and granted it new territories, Podgorica among them. After more than four hundred years under Ottoman rule, the city became part of the Montenegrin state, ruled from Cetinje by Prince (later King) Nikola I.
Joining Montenegro brought an urban transformation. Next to the old Ottoman core of Stara Varoš, on the other side of the Ribnica river, a new quarter with a more regular, European layout was planned. It was called Mirkova Varoš in honour of Mirko Petrović, King Nikola's father. Podgorica began to modernise: new streets, administrative buildings, shops. Although Cetinje was still the capital, Podgorica, set on a fertile plain at a crossroads, had a potential for growth that the old mountain capital could not match.
This period of progress, however, would be cut short by the upheavals of the 20th century. The Balkan Wars, the First World War and the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Montenegro hit the city and the country hard. In 1918, when the kingdom ceased to exist and Montenegro was united with Serbia within the future Yugoslav state, Podgorica became part of a much larger political framework, as the capital of a region, on its way to becoming Montenegro's main urban centre.
The most tragic chapter in Podgorica's history came with the Second World War. Occupied by Axis troops, the city became a military target and was almost completely devastated. Podgorica is estimated to have been bombed dozens of times between 1943 and 1944, mostly by Allied aircraft attacking German positions, in a series of raids that flattened much of the city and killed thousands. Very little of the historic city was left standing; its Ottoman fabric and its 19th-century quarters lay in ruins.
When the war ended, with the victory of the communist Partisans and the founding of Josip Broz Tito's socialist Yugoslavia, Podgorica was chosen as capital of the Socialist Republic of Montenegro, one of the six federal republics. In 1946, in tribute to the Yugoslav leader, the city was renamed Titograd ('Tito's city'). It would keep that name for more than four decades.
Titograd was rebuilt almost from scratch along the lines of socialist urban planning: wide avenues, housing blocks, rational-looking public buildings, industry and a university. The city's population grew quickly and it modernised, leaving its past as a provincial town behind. This rebuilding explains why today's Podgorica looks mostly modern, with relatively few old remains: it's not that it lacks history, but that its physical history was largely erased by the bombs and rewritten in a socialist key. The Stara Varoš quarter, with its clock tower and mosques, remained as one of the few surviving traces of the Ottoman past.
With the end of communism and the break-up of Yugoslavia, the city got its historical name back: in 1992, Titograd became Podgorica again. During the 1990s, Montenegro stayed united with Serbia, first in a smaller Yugoslavia and then in the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, while the independence movement grew. Podgorica, as the administrative capital, was the political stage for that process.
On 21 May 2006, a referendum narrowly approved Montenegro's independence, and the country declared itself a sovereign state. Podgorica thus became the capital of an independent country for the first time in its history (Cetinje kept the honorary title of historical capital). Since then the city has gone through a period of growth and openness: new bridges such as the Millennium Bridge (2005), the monumental Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ (consecrated in 2013), office buildings, hotels, shopping centres and a growing cultural and university life.
Today Podgorica is a modest but functional capital of just over a hundred thousand people, very different from the tourist postcards of Kotor or Budva. It is the country's political, economic and transport centre: here you'll find the government, the parliament, the main airport and the big rail hub where the train down from Belgrade comes in. Its character — a mix of socialist blocks, contemporary landmarks, the Ottoman corner of Stara Varoš and the Roman ruins of Doclea on the outskirts — actually sums up the whole history of the country: classical Antiquity, the Ottoman past, the tragedy and rebuilding of the 20th century, and the pulse of a young nation looking for its place in 21st-century Europe.
