The captains of Boka: Perast's 18th-century sea power

A bay that built admirals, not just fishermen

The first time I stood on the Perast waterfront and counted the palace facades along maybe 500 metres of shore, I lost track somewhere past a dozen. That is unusual for a village that today holds a few hundred residents. It was not always this quiet. In the 1700s, Perast was, by some counts, home to around 100 sea captains and close to 400 registered ships, at a time when its whole population barely reached a few thousand. For its size, it may have produced more captains and shipowners than almost any other port on the Adriatic. That fact does not show up on a postcard, but it explains every stone building you are looking at.

I bring this up because it is easy to walk through the Bay of Kotor treating it purely as scenery: a ria carved by a drowned river valley, ringed by mountains, good for a boat photo. It is that. But the palaces at Perast and Dobrota were not built by nobility living off inherited land. They were built with shipping money, insurance money, and naval salaries earned from Venice to the Baltic. Understanding that changes how you read the architecture, and it is worth ten extra minutes on any walk through these villages.

Training as far as St Petersburg

The detail that surprised me most, digging into this, is how far some of these captains travelled to learn their trade. Perast ran its own maritime school by the early 1700s, one of the earliest in this part of the Adriatic, teaching navigation, cartography, and shipbuilding to boys who would otherwise have gone straight to sea as deckhands. Some graduates did not stop at local trade routes.

The best-documented case is Matija Zmajević, born in Perast, who left for Russia and joined the navy that Peter the Great was building almost from nothing. Zmajević rose to admiral and eventually commanded Russia’s Baltic fleet, a startling trajectory for someone from a Adriatic town of a few thousand people. He was not the only Boka sailor to serve a foreign crown, but he is the one whose career is best recorded, and Perast still treats him as one of its own.

That connection to St Petersburg is not a stray anecdote. Venice controlled the Bay of Kotor for most of this period, and Boka sailors crewed and captained Venetian vessels across the Mediterranean. But Venice’s naval decline in the 18th century pushed ambitious captains to look elsewhere for commissions, and Russia’s new navy, hungry for experienced Adriatic seamen, was an obvious destination. A handful of the palaces you see in Perast and Dobrota were paid for, at least in part, by careers that had nothing to do with the bay itself.

The palaces that captains built

Walk the Perast waterfront and you are looking at roughly sixteen baroque palaces packed into a small stretch of shore, most dating from the late 17th to mid-18th century. The Bujović Palace, now partly a museum, is the one most visitors stop at, with its stone balconies and carved coat of arms.

Further along, the Visković, Smekja, and Zmajević family houses (yes, that Zmajević family) show the same pattern: a solid ground floor built for warehousing goods and gear, an ornate piano nobile above where the family lived and entertained, and stonework good enough that a 1979 earthquake cracked plenty of it without bringing it all down. Reconstruction after that earthquake, much of it done under UNESCO oversight once the whole bay was inscribed, restored most facades to something close to their original state, though a few interiors were rebuilt rather than repaired.

Dobrota tells the same story at greater length. The village runs for roughly 4km along the shore just north of Kotor, and at its peak it is said to have had more registered ship captains per head of population than almost anywhere on the Adriatic coast. There is no single grand square here the way there is in Perast; instead the captains’ houses simply line the coast road one after another, most still private homes, a few with small plaques noting a family name and a launch date. It rewards a slow walk or a bike ride rather than a checklist of sights, and it gets a fraction of the visitors Kotor’s old town does, which is part of the appeal.

If you would rather see this stretch of coast from the water, which is how most of these captains actually experienced it, a boat trip past Perast and on to Perast and Budva along the bay covers the same ground without the walking, and gives you the view these houses were designed to project outward, toward the sea and toward arriving ships.

The confraternity that never quite stopped

What struck me most, though, is that this is not entirely a closed chapter. The Bokeljska mornarica, a maritime confraternity or brotherhood of Boka seafarers, claims roots going back many centuries, tied loosely to the same seafaring culture that produced Perast’s captains. It survived Venetian rule, Austrian rule, two Yugoslavias, and is still active today. Its members appear at festivals in dark-blue ceremonial uniforms trimmed with gold braid, performing the kolo, a slow, circular sword dance that has nothing to do with tourist folklore and everything to do with genuine local tradition passed down through maritime families.

You can see the mornarica in person at the Fašinada on 22 July, when boats circle Our Lady of the Rocks off Perast, or at Boka Night later in the season, when the bay fills with lit-up boats after dark. Neither event is staged for visitors, though visitors are welcome to watch from the shore or from a boat. If your timing does not line up with either festival, the Maritime Museum in Kotor’s old town is where the mornarica’s uniforms, ship models, and captains’ portraits are kept year-round, and it is the natural place to make sense of everything you have seen at Perast and Dobrota.

Before or after any of this, a walk around Kotor’s old town, a stop at Risan for its Roman mosaics, or a quieter detour through Stoliv fills out the picture of a bay that was, for a couple of centuries, exporting captains rather than just importing tourists.

For a fuller day combining several of these stops with a guide who can point out details you would otherwise walk past, a trip like Kotor’s highlights with a local guide covers the old town alongside Perast, or you can take it slower by e-tuktuk on a route through Prčanj, Tivat, and Trojica Hill, which passes several of Dobrota’s captains’ houses on the way.

If the Blue Cave is also on your list for the same trip, it is worth combining with a Boka Bay boat tour that includes the Blue Cave rather than doing two separate boat days.

None of this needs a full history degree to enjoy. But once you know that a captain from a village of a few hundred people once commanded a Russian fleet on the Baltic, the palaces along Perast and Dobrota stop looking like generic old stone buildings and start looking like what they actually are: the visible remains of a genuinely unusual maritime career path, one that ran from this narrow ria all the way to St Petersburg and back.