St George island, the one with the cypresses

Of the two islands off Perast, everyone photographs the one with the blue dome. The other, dark with cypresses, has the better story. St George is natural, has a church from the 12th century and holds the village’s old cemetery. It also has a legend that you won’t forget once you’ve heard it.

A natural island with a graveyard

Kotor’s tourist board describes it in a few lines. It’s a natural island, with a 12th-century church named after the saint and a cemetery where the people of Perast were buried in the past. That’s all the official information I’ve found about what’s on it, and I won’t embroider it.

The National Tourism Organisation names it alongside its neighbour as one of the two islands to see from Perast, but unlike Our Lady of the Rocks it mentions no museum and no visiting hours.

The soldier and Katica

In 1813 Perast’s townspeople took the Holy Cross fortress, which had stood above the village since 1570. The French pulled back to St George and set up their cannon there. On his superior’s orders, a French soldier, Ante Slović, fired at the fortress, but the shot hit the house of his sweetheart, Katica Kalfić, who was killed and buried in the island’s cemetery. He stayed on in the monastery, became Friar Frane and rang the bell every day until his death. At his request, he was buried beside her.

Kotor’s tourist board adds that the story reportedly inspired the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin’s famous The Isle of the Dead. It hedges that with a reportedly, and so do I. What grips me isn’t the painting but the setting, the island turned into a gun position aimed at the very village that buried its dead there.

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How to see it

I haven’t found anything on an official site saying you can land on St George, nor any hours or prices. What’s clear is that it sits right in front of Perast’s waterfront and that the boats to Our Lady of the Rocks pass close by. Take one of those boats early in the morning, with the low light on the cypresses, and ask the boatman to circle slowly.

Filling in the story on dry land

The island has no museum, but the village does. Perast Museum, in the Bujović Palace, is one of Kotor’s municipal museums. Entry is €8. In summer it stays open until 20:00, in winter it closes at 16:00, and it never opens on a Monday or in January. It’s the best place to get a feel for the village of sea captains who guarded the bay, and who ended up turning one island into a graveyard and the other into a shrine.

For both islands in one frame, the best spot is up high, in St Nicholas’s 55 m bell tower. And if you’re driving in from Kotor, the shore road puts both islands in front of you as you reach Perast.

To sleep close to everything, search places to stay in Perast on Booking.com and filter by area before price.