When sailing into the Bay of Kotor, you will be surprised by the landscape you find. All the reference reading tells us that we are sailing into an old river system which was flooded after the last ice age. But it looks more like one of the Norwegian Fiords which were formed by glaciers.
The Bay of Kotor is an U-shaped valley, has terminal and lateral moraines und a broad valley bottom - albeit inundated now. But consulting maps of the ice age reveals no glaciation in this area. The Bay of Kotor is too far south.
Well, that is what I thought before contacting people in the area who knew that there was a small glacier high up in the mountains behind the Bay of Kotor. It is called Debeli Names and lies in the Durmitor Massif at an altitude of 2'455 meters above sea.
The tiny Durmitor Glacier - tiny but permanent
The Durmitor Massif is one of the wettest areas in the Mediterranean (same as the Bay of Kotor) and gets a lot of rain during the year - snow of course during the winter. There is so much snow during the winter months that the glacier survives even the above zero Celsius temperatures during July and August. Similar small glaciers can also be found in the mountains between Montenegro and Albania at a slightly higher altitude of 2'800 meter above sea. The honour to the southern most glacier in Europe however goes to Italy's Calderone Glacier in the Abruzzi Mountains (Montenegrin geologists murmur that it will melt soon and than the title is theirs ...)
The solution to the puzzle was simpler than I thought. I looked up the wrong map. There were four large glaciations in Europe over the last 2.6 million years - the glaciation of the Bay of Kotor happened around 1.5 million - it was on the third map! At that time, sea levels were about 120 meter lower than today. Just outside the Bay of Kotor, there is a huge ancient river delta 100 meters below the sea. Fish love it and you can see the trawlers there every morning - it is fishing paradise. With an age of 1.5 million years, the Kotor Glacier is three times older than the English Channel which was carved when a giant fresh water lake burst its ice dam and rushed west.
We now know why the mountain flanks in the Kotor Bay are so smooth - they were polished by a mighty glacier! One nice side effect of its polishing work: we can climb the fortress watching over the medieval town of Kotor without climbing gear. Flip flops will do - provided you are in good shape for the 1'355 steps (260 meters).
View 2/3 up on the way to the Kotor Fortress - the large cruise liner can only reach Kotor because the glacier carved the bay so deeply 1.5 million years ago
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