The Ministry of Culture and Media will form a special body made up of experts, whose goal will be to determine the state of Budva's greatest cultural and historical treasure - the Old Town.
This was confirmed to "Vijesti" by the former state secretary in that government department Dragana Kazanegra Stanišić, on whose initiative this body will be crippled.
"While I was working in the Ministry of Culture and Media, I launched an initiative that was adopted by the minister Tamara Vujović. The line ministry will form a body that will be composed of various experts from the fields related to cultural assets and archaeology, architects, ethnologists, anthropologists... from the state and the region. Their task will be to screen the current state of the Old Town as a cultural asset", said Kažanegra Stanišić, current state secretary in the MUP.
According to her, their task will be to create measures that will be recommended to the local administration for further management and care of the Old Town.
"A similar council was established after the earthquake in 1979, and since then no one has dealt with the Old Town in such a studious way. This body will have a clear task of creating a document that will be a key guideline for further management and sustainable development of the Old Town," she said.
The current state of the Old Town is not commendable at all. The view from the ramparts of the Old Town reveals all the carelessness of the citizens who live in the cultural monument of the first category, as well as the powerlessness of the authorities to stop its deterioration.
Nine years ago, an elaboration was made on the state of the cultural heritage of Montenegro, which also included the Old Town. At the time, the public was aware that as many as a thousand devastations had been found in the Old Town and on its ramparts.
The last state control of the Commission for the Protection of Cultural Property was in 2014. Then the commission established that the Old Town has nine new houses, 22 raised floors and more than 1.200, conditionally speaking, small changes to the cultural heritage that is protected by law. We are talking about new balconies, new viewing points, expansion of storefronts, plastic and aluminum windows, doors, street storefronts and showcases, roller doors, iron gratings, awnings, various columns and arches. According to all criteria, the Old Town should be "removed" from the list of protected cultural monuments even then.
From 2003 to 2006, the former Institute for the Protection of Monuments filed 11 criminal charges for "unlawful construction", but the prosecution did not prosecute any of them.
One of the most brutal examples of the devastation of the Old Town, under the patronage of local authorities, happened in 2015, when the then city administration approved the decision of the Secretariat for City Infrastructure to install designer illuminations on the city ramparts. Karim Rashid.
Rashid's illumination in the form of a double row of light pipes, 250 meters long, was installed on the eve of the 2015 celebration. The problem arose because the illumination was installed on 1,4-meter-long metal supports, which were fixed with screws into the centuries-old stone walls.
The "Stari grad" local community then filed a criminal complaint. A year later, the municipality had to remove the illumination and repair the damage, admitting that the devastation had been done.
The pylons "served" as chiviluk in the boutique
The Municipality has repeatedly pointed out, responding to the appeals of the "Stari grad" Local Community, that the pylons, the ancient gate of Budva, will also be "liberated".
Pylons, as an exceptional trace of the urban structure of the Hellenistic city, have been a fixture in an old town boutique for years.
Pylons from the XNUMXth century, the gate of ancient Budva, were unfortunately degraded by being part of the boutique's inventory. It is planned that this monument will be "liberated" and enable tourists and other visitors to Budva to see it unhindered.
The local community "Stari grad" had earlier called on the authorities in the municipality to expropriate a commercial building that houses a valuable cultural and historical monument. "When discovering the ancient gate in 1985, the municipal authority did not take into account the law from 1945 according to which everything found 20 centimeters below the surface of the earth belongs to the state. Through the exchange of premises, one owner was given a premises in another place, and the private owner for 2/3 of the area remained the owner, although he cannot be the owner of the space that was subsequently excavated under his ground floor. "No one dealt with this problem, so one of the oldest cultural monuments in Montenegro is now in the function of a boutique," stated the "Stari grad" Ministry of Health at the time.
It has not been in the plans since the 1979 earthquake
Six years after the devastating earthquake in 1979, when the Old Town was razed to the ground, the Urban Plan was adopted. At the end of the 90s, the municipality of Budva entered into the story of the revision of the planning document and assigned the work to the Construction Institute AD Budva. Since 1998, when the expert commission was formed, the whole business has remained at a standstill.
Other municipal authorities did not tackle the rampant construction in the Old Town and passed a planning document either.
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