Cause of the collapse of part of the city walls, a group of Kotor citizens sent a protest letter to Venice today.
In an ironically intoned public letter, a group of Kotor intellectuals stated that the city "got a new tourist attraction - the buttress that fell, but is still standing" and stated that the cause of this was its "poor construction" 600 years ago, not carelessness and neglect of the state of Montenegro to maintain the ramparts of Kotor as one of the protected historical monuments of UNESCO.
One of the two massive buttresses on the northern wall of the Kotor city ramparts on the stretch from the northern city gate to the Bembo bastion gave way on Thursday morning and began to collapse.
The high triangular stone building, which "leans" on the outside of the ramparts and supports them, completely separated from the wall and leaned towards the Škurda river, in the bed of which the foundation of the buttress is located.
On the same part of the ramparts, only on their inner side, a month and a half ago, a ten-meter long part of the fence wall collapsed, and the state and the Municipality of Kotor have not yet begun to repair the damage.
"Dear Venetian gentlemen, with your negligence and poor work, you have caused Kotor's ramparts to begin to collapse after 600 years, and worst of all, you have led people to think that the state and municipal authorities and those who are obliged to maintain the ramparts are guilty of this situation. No, gentlemen, we are all witnesses to the regular maintenance of the ramparts by the authorities and only your comments have led to the fact that the ramparts cannot stand even for 600 years," reads the protest letter published on social networks.
The correspondents, architect Aleksandar Dender and Đuro Moškov, reprimanded the Venetians for not building "buttresses made of concrete and reinforcement", as a temporary building - a 190-square-meter cafe and restaurant - has been built in recent months at the observation deck on the Turkish Cape in Veriga.
"Why don't you emulate Verige, that miracle that was made as a temporary structure of reinforced concrete and which will never fall, and your permanent buttress made of stone, did not last even six centuries. Why didn't you immediately separate it from the ramparts, and not even now you wouldn't have any problems either. As the 600-year guarantee period has not yet expired, we demand that you come urgently and remove the defects on the buttress as soon as possible at your own expense, because the money we collect from the ramparts every year is invested in much smarter purposes, not into these karsts that keep falling. If you don't eliminate the mentioned defects within a reasonable time, we will allow the other buttresses to fall as well and not only them, as proof of your bad work and as proof that the foreigners have never brought us anything good, but only a cost," he concludes in a letter of protest to the Republic of Venice, which governed and built Kotor until 1797.
Martinović: Where is the profit from the ramparts?
Recalling the old Venetian proverb about an expensive undertaking - "Te costerebbe come le mura di Cattaro" (It will cost you like the walls of Kotor), the former director of the Regional Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments and one of the best connoisseurs of the architecture and history of Kotor, Jovica Martinović, MSc, on Facebook wondered how much money Kotor's ramparts, which are collapsing due to carelessness and lack of state investment, have earned in the past ten years from collecting tickets for tourists to visit the Kotor fortress.
"If only a tenth of a year was invested in maintenance and if a permanent working group was formed for maintenance and emergency interventions on the ramparts - this would not have happened!", wrote Martinović.
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