The murals of Podgorica!

 When we talked to the young waiter in the cafe on our first morning in Podgorica, Montenegro, he produced the most excellent one liner, which I am tempted to have on a T-shirt:

"Podgorica is the least-visited capital city in the EU, and there is a reason for that"

His schtick was that compared to London, Paris, Berlin etc there was absolutely nothing to see or do in Podgorica, even though he acknowledged that it was a good place to live as it was cheap, there was work, decent traffic and beautiful mountains all around it. But essentially he said "All the tourists arrive and go straight down to the coast because there is no reason for them to turn north at the airport instead of south"

But I have to say that - even thought our visit was admittedly a short, sharp tour and he presumably had years of the place, there was so much of great interest in the city that I felt I should big it up a bit. I admit that it has little left of its old buildings - it was bombed to hell by the Allies near the end of WWII to impede German troop movements, but the one area that still has its old character the 'Stara Varos' or Old Town, was the place that we stayed. So we did see what little old architecture there was.

But Podgorica has much modern life and art to recommend it, and I wanted to show some of the art which is on the walls of many buildings. Now it does admittedly have plenty of low-grade graffiti that seems to me to have no value at all, but on disused buildings there are some really interesting proper works, not all of which I think are state-sponsored (but I guess that some are).

Here in no particular order are some ones that grabbed my attention, including one for the Ultras of the local football team, who call themselves the Varvari or Vandals, in a nod to the Northern tribes of the Roman  Empire (and, winningly, they sometimes dragoon in Hagar the Horrible to represent themselves). Enjoy, and don't be put off if you do consider a little trip to Montenegro. Podgorica really is worth a visit (and also has some really fine brutalist architecture).