The foundation stone with the initials of Prince Nikola Petrovic I and the date was laid in 1905 from his yacht "Rumija". With this, in the sea below the mountain of the same name, the then Montenegrin ruler made official the intention to build a port. In that place, protected from view from the sea by the breakwater and the Volujica hill, the project that had begun would experience over the next 120 years the bombing of warehouses, mining, visits by warships, submarines and seaplanes, lack of money, wars, modernization and major damage during the 1979 earthquake, rehabilitation and ultimately - the division of the coastal giant into two halves.
It is just a drop of history recorded in blood and sweat, stone and iron, which can still be felt in the Port of Bar today.
The former industrial giant is now reduced to working with spilled cargo, and its indoor and outdoor warehouses, silos and other facilities house valuable and cheaper materials, such as aluminum, cement, salt, bauxite, scrap iron sent to Turkey, copper, coal and grain. Some of them are worth $3.000 per ton, while in the warehouses they can be found in piles worth up to $60 million...
Accessible in the very center of this coastal municipality, but hidden behind numerous fences and gates, lies the Free Zone of the Port of Bar - which was visited by “Vijesti”. This port heart once beat as one, but in 2009 the Port of Bar was divided and the company “Kontejnerski terminali” was separated from it, the majority share package of which was sold by the then Government to “Global Ports” for eight million euros in 2013. The company was later renamed “Port of Adria”.
This division has made the Port's operations much more difficult, as they have retained the dock and equipment under the Volujica hill and the space and warehouses in the part closest to the city center, while "Port of Adria" has received the central container section. Thus, a visit to this place itself weaves a paradoxical story in which the Port operates on the edges of its former own territory, and for loading and unloading cargo it cannot use all 20 kilometers of railway tracks, wagons and roads - because they now partly belong to and cross over the plots of land of the competing company "Port of Adria".
A heart without arteries
The absurdity of this situation is not hidden even by the acting executive director of the Port of Bar. Ilija Pješčić, who said that they have direct competition in the port itself, and that the job is difficult because a private company can purchase goods anywhere on the market, while they, as a state-owned company, are subject to public procurement rules and buy everything new. He claims that certain parts are significantly more expensive through tenders, because everyone in the process takes a certain margin, so their final price is 30 to 50 percent higher.
"It is divided on a parity basis, let's say, half and half. However, 'Port of Adria' occupies the infrastructural heart of the port and its most developed part. This is a problem because our railway and traffic corridors are cut off. We cannot transport goods through their area, we cannot use internal roads, but go around the perimeter of the Free Zone, which costs us a lot. However, our problem is the railway, the fact is that we have one cargo operator with infrastructural difficulties, which additionally slow down the transport process," he stressed.
Although the capacity of the Port of Bar is rented out for dry berths and part of the warehouse is rented out, it is a fascinating feeling to walk between the facilities and see the stored material, to watch workers loading containers onto wagons, collecting metal for shipping by ship to Turkey - and then the whole process is stopped because of a private fence, which must be bypassed. Thus, the Port of Bar functions in parallel as an organism with a neglected circulatory system and as an industrial babushka within which another large company operates.
Pješčić stressed that they can receive about 2,5 million tons of goods annually, which they proved after the ship traffic in the Black Sea was stopped due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He added that Montenegro is a small country, but that the port can significantly participate in the markets of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Hungary. He emphasized that 12 percent of all goods entering and leaving Serbia go through the Port of Bar, and that 30 percent of the population of Montenegro could live from its work, while up to 3.000 families currently live there.
President of the Port Workers' Union of the Port of Bar Vladimir Obradovic said that he had been working at the Port since May 1991, and that it used to be a pleasure to see a crowd of workers entering the main gate and later to raise the ramp for 1.600 of them. He stated that at the same time there were 15 ships at this location, while more than 20 were anchored, and that he received two marks as a salary as a security worker.
However, he was most hurt by the division of Luka, so he announced resistance if there was a new privatization.
"It's hard for me to mention everything we destroyed for no reason. How terrible it was, how you're going to separate the electricity grid, water, how you're going to divide the machinery... It's terrible, all our spare parts were left in 'Port of Adria' and then they resold them to us. Unbelievable things happened. So, I think, I talk about it with a little bitterness, we were lucky not to end up like 'Primorka'," Obradović said.
He pointed out that the "Sidro" hotel was also sold, even though it was built by port workers who gave their five-day holiday in the 1970s, and that he was informed about it because his father was one of them.
Damage done, no money
A severe storm caused significant material damage to the Port of Bar in July 2024, when, among other things, all three loading bridges, more than 30 meters high and weighing 400 tons, collapsed due to strong winds, while a grain loading tower also collapsed. Obradović stressed that the state has been able to help them so far, but that not a single euro has been invested in the company.
Pješčić pointed out that the expert's findings showed that the damage amounted to 13,5 million euros, so they eventually took out a loan from the Investment and Development Fund and mortgaged their property to buy a mobile crane worth five million euros.
"We have done everything that was asked of us, we are fully acceptable from the aspect of the Competition Protection Agency, so it is possible that we will be granted aid, but still nothing of that. The problem is if they do not provide aid, we automatically have to interfere in the social part of the story of this company, so the salaries of employees must immediately stagnate, there is no increase... And the state has the possibility and has the right to give us aid," said Pješčić.
He added that a storm of this strength could not have been predicted, that all work had been carried out regularly before, and that the wind speed according to the findings exceeded 205 kilometers per hour, while one of the cranes was close to tipping over with two people in it. The loading bridges on the rails were destroyed in the storm, while Pješčić explained that the experts determined that the heart of the storm was at the end of the pier, after which the position of Mount Volucija served as a funnel and directed the winds towards the loading bridges, with houses near the Port also being damaged.
He pointed out that the workers of the company that was repairing the coast also left their jobs that day, because the water began to rise, and fortunately no one was injured. Pješčić emphasized that they have been working on the repair of the coast since 2021 and that it will cost them about 5,5 million euros, as they are renovating 556 meters of the pier, while they expect the work to be completed by the end of next year.
On this half-kilometer stretch, you can see several loading cranes, wheat silos, some of the crushed containers damaged in the storm, scattered stored coal, several meters deep holes in the dock where repairs are being carried out, while, as Pješčić says, this place is the heart of their business, which brings in up to 85 percent of their income.
Is the berth for patrol boats?
Pješčić also explained that they own a mooring for ships not far from the waters of the Montenegrin Navy, as well as three larger and smaller ones on Volujica. He says that they could now lose one, which is eight meters deep, because future patrol ships would moor there.
Montenegro signed a contract with the French concern "Kership" for the construction of two "OPV-60 M" ships in November 2024, and they were supposed to enter operational use by the Navy in early 2027. This job will cost 120 million euros, without complete weapons and equipment.
"The Ministry of Defense of Montenegro has expressed interest in taking over this part of the port. That would be bad because they would take away this pier and we would lose the berth permanently. If that happens, we will no longer have an operational shore in this part, leaving us with only three berths near Volujica, with depths of about 12 meters," he pointed out.
Pješčić emphasized that they previously had problems with emissions of harmful substances, but that since last year, copper has been delivered in closed containers, so there are no more emissions into the air, and that they have also planted hundreds of pine trees to protect nearby houses from dust, so the impact on the environment and human health has been minimized.
He added that sediment and water quality sampling is done annually, but that the biggest polluter is, in fact, the city's sewage outfall that erupts in the heart of the Port.
They reached 16 million
Pješčić stressed that the port desperately needs the availability of money from European Union funds, that feasibility studies can be done for investing in railways and road coverage, and that this is the beginning of the logistics story. He said that the investments are not large, compared to what is gained through them, and that they have done a project that showed that the port's waters could be deepened to 16 meters, which would cost up to six million euros.
He added that investments could also be made in extending the shoreline of Pier 5, so that it could accommodate all the cruisers and ferries that come to this part of the Adriatic, which would cost a maximum of ten million.
"We will end the year in the red, the estimate is somewhere around 15 to 16 million euros in revenue. The company has the capacity to grow, it just needs to be developed by the company owner. There is no more smuggling, we control it and have good cooperation with the police and the Customs Administration. The port area needs to be reunified. I know it costs money, I know the problems are big, but this investment would have a synergistic effect on the entire economy. All ports in this part of the Adriatic are growing in terms of infrastructure and state investment. We are witnessing the Albanian Government investing a billion euros in Porto Romano at the moment, through three tranches," Pješčić emphasized.
He added that the Port of Bar already has a greater depth than the Albanian port, but that the lack of investment is best illustrated by the fact that the only new capacity since the construction of the Free Zone is the 13 million euros that the partner investor will invest in the transshipment of liquid cargo, oil, phosphoric acid, artificial fertilizers, and who has purchased two tanks. He emphasized that this will bring them a million euros of pure profit annually from renting out the space.
Near this future project, there are dozens of meters high grain silos with a capacity of 50.000 tons, while Pješčić states that the whole of Montenegro consumes less than 30.000 tons annually.
Apart from being important for the Port, a short ride by freight elevator offers a view of the entire Bar, with the entire Port infrastructure clearly visible. Breakwaters with huge concrete wave breakers and oil reception areas, docks and cranes for cargo transshipment, a network of rails and wagons, countless warehouses and spilled materials, hundreds of multi-colored cars that the “Port of Adria” loads into containers, machines and trucks that rotate between buildings, huge gray oil tanks of “Jugopetrol”, and even a quarry - from this height they clearly indicate the potential of this concrete industrial model in miniature, which hums like an anthill under the watchful eye of Volujica and Rumija.
Workers against privatization
The president of the Port of Bar Port Workers' Union, Vladimir Obradović, announced that the company's workers will not support its restructuring or privatization plan and that they will prevent it at all costs.
"We, as unions, will prevent any attempt at privatization, by all possible means, because there are no examples of successful privatization as far as workers are concerned - I don't know of any. We oppose privatization, outsourcing, restructuring, making up fairy tales. When someone tells you restructuring, they mean privatization," he said.
A similar message came from the president of the trade union organization, Alis Šabotic, who stated that at the meeting of the Committee for Economy, Finance and Budget held on December 17, which was attended by a representative of the Confederation of Trade Unions, they requested a clear answer regarding the possibility of financial assistance to the Port of Bar.
"Representatives of the Ministry of Finance stated that the state cannot provide financial assistance, which is not true, because the regulations allow for assistance in cases of natural disasters and the protection of strategic infrastructure. We are also aware that the restructuring of the Port of Bar is being considered. The unions know very well what such processes mean, because during the previous restructuring, a key part of the Port's business system was lost, what we call the "heart of the Port". We want to say that the employees of the Port of Bar will very soon give their response to this attitude towards the company and its employees," emphasized Šabotić.
Pješčić emphasized that he is not yet familiar with this state plan.
They also stock explosives.
In addition to protecting the Port of Bar from direct waves, Volujica Hill is also crossed by a tunnel. Passing through this passage, secured by cameras and just wide enough for a car, you will reach what is probably one of the best-hidden viewpoints in Bar.
Here, the sea stretches out before your eyes on all sides, while the path along it leads to more warehouses, containers, and other facilities - where explosives are stored.
Pješčić explained that at this location they can accommodate 80 containers outdoors, and another 100 tons in closed warehouses, and that this specific service is well paid.
"This is the unique position that this port has and an advantage over other ports, because all others do not have this natural opportunity like the Volujica hill. In the event of any unwanted situation, the risk is minimized because the shock wave would go to the open sea, there would be no threat to human lives and infrastructure. It is additionally provided with lightning protection, Faraday cages, grounded... Each container is checked by a control house that issues a grounding certificate. It is serious work, but it has been done for decades. That is the potential, Serbia's export is a billion euros from the specialized industry, 300 million euros from Bosnia... A good part of that work, due to EU policy, goes to the Bulgarian port of Burgas," he said.
Not far from this place is a natural bay - Bigovica Bay, where an LNG terminal could potentially be built.
See more:
Download the app and follow the news
FOLLOW US ON
