Pljevlja, the northern town where church and mosque meet

Pljevlja is the north’s great unknown. It sits at the top of the country, far from the coast and the usual routes, and hardly anyone builds it into their trip. Yet it has one of the finest mosques in the Balkans, a monastery with a library of manuscripts, the remains of a Roman town whose name is a mystery and a river that winds through spectacular meanders. In the national tourist board’s words it’s where Christianity and Islam meet, and that’s exactly what you see walking round.

A border town and a crossroads

Pljevlja lies in the middle of a broad basin below Golubinja hill, where the Breznica, Ćehotina and Vezišnica rivers meet, according to its tourist board. The municipality borders Bosnia and Herzegovina to the west and Serbia to the north, and it contains Montenegro’s northernmost point, Moćevići, according to MONSTAT. It’s upland country under forest, which covers 70% of the municipality, and it had 24,134 people at the 2023 census, 16,419 of them in the town.

Trade caravans heading east to Constantinople passed this way, and that crossroads past, the tourist board says, is where its reputation for two faiths living side by side comes from.

From Municipium S to Taslidža

The story goes back a long way. The tourist board mentions Palaeolithic remains in a cave below Gospića vrh, on the upper Ćehotina. In Roman times there was a town at Komini, in the province of Dalmatia, whose full name isn’t known, so archaeologists call it Municipium S. The national tourist board says its graves, from the 1st to the 4th century, have yielded more than 1,200 objects, now in the local museum, among them a diatreta, an extremely rare luxury glass cup.

When the Slavs arrived the Roman town was abandoned and a new one grew up nearby. The tourist board records it as Breznik in the 9th century and says that in 1465, under the Ottomans, it was renamed Taslidža. The main street, the Čaršija, takes its name from that period and is still where the shops, cafés and social life are.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Pljevlja before prices climb.

The mosque and the monastery

The best-known monument is the Husein Pasha Mosque, built in 1569 according to the tourist board, with a 42-metre minaret, domes, a 16th-century Quran manuscript and an Egyptian carpet more than 400 years old. The clock tower stands beside it.

The Holy Trinity Monastery is the town’s other great symbol. The tourist board explains that there’s no reliable date for its founding, but that the first written record is from 1537, that for more than a century it was an important copying centre, and that its library and treasury hold manuscripts, icons and goldsmiths’ work, along with relics including a hand of St Sava.

Nature around the town

Between Pljevlja and the Bosnian border, the Ćehotina forms deeply cut meanders that the tourist board considers one of the most striking natural features in the north, with viewpoints over the bends. To the south, the municipality looks into the Tara Canyon and the Draga canyon, up to 800 metres deep, and the Đurđevića Tara Bridge, with its zip line, stands where the roads to Pljevlja, Žabljak and Mojkovac meet.

The tourist board also recommends two medieval forts, Koznik in the village of Kozica, about 20 km south-east, and the ruins of a herceg’s summer residence on Kukanj hill above the Ćehotina, about 10 km north-west. The town and its surroundings also have Second World War memorials, such as the 1961 one at Stražica to those killed in the 1941 battle of Pljevlja, and the one to the Italian partisan division Garibaldi at Rabitlje.

If you would rather have a local show you round, book a guided tour in Pljevlja and choose by the reviews.

Climate and when to go

Pljevlja has cold winters. In 2024 the town’s weather station recorded a January mean of 0.2 °C and a July mean of 21.8 °C, with 43 days of snow on the ground, according to MONSTAT. I’d go between May and September, when the mountain roads to the Tara and Durmitor are at their best and Vodice park makes for a pleasant evening stroll. Pljevlja isn’t on ZPCG’s passenger network, so plan on driving, on the right, or on an intercity bus.

Without a car, the coach is the only option. The ticket site busticket4.me showed four coaches from Podgorica to Pljevlja for 21-10-2026, at 07:30, 10:00, 14:38 and 17:05, taking just under four hours for about €13.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Pljevlja before prices climb.