Ostrog Monastery

Ostrog Monastery tickets: which one to buy

There is no entrance fee at all; the monastery lives on donations and on the candle stalls by the gates. What you pay for is the drive, and it is a memorable one: a narrow switchback road climbs from the Zeta valley to the Lower Monastery and then continues, tighter still, to the Upper Monastery pressed into the cliff at 900 metres. Buses and larger coaches stop at the lower level, from where it is a 2.5-kilometre walk up or a short ride in one of the minibuses that wait there.

Day tours run from Budva, Kotor, Podgorica and Niksic and cost a moderate amount, usually combining Ostrog with the Zeta plain or with Durmitor national park, which makes a long day. A hire car is easy but the final section is genuinely narrow with passing places, and in high summer the queue of vehicles can be slow. Pilgrims often walk the last stretch barefoot.

Visiting Ostrog Monastery: what to see

Vasilije, the metropolitan of Herzegovina, withdrew to these caves in the seventeenth century and died here in 1671; canonised as St Basil of Ostrog, he became the most venerated saint in Montenegro, and his relics in the Upper Monastery draw over a million visitors a year, Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim alike. The Upper Monastery is built directly into a vertical rock face, its whitewashed front fitted to the cliff so that the building looks stuck on rather than constructed.

Two cave churches survive from the original foundation: the Church of the Presentation, frescoed at the end of the seventeenth century, and above it the Church of the Holy Cross, painted by the master Radul straight onto the rock so that the figures follow the swellings of the stone. The queue to venerate the relics can take an hour on feast days. Behind the monastery a vine is said to have grown from the bare rock where the saint died.

Ostrog Monastery opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from early morning until evening, with the liturgy in the early morning. The pilgrimage season peaks around the feast of St Basil on 12 May, when tens of thousands come and the road is effectively blocked; visit on any ordinary weekday instead. Summer afternoons bring both heat and coach traffic, so early morning is best in every way, with mist still in the valley. Winter access depends on the weather, and the upper road can be closed by ice.

Dress code is strictly enforced: knees and shoulders covered, women in skirts, and wraps are lent at the entrance. Photography is forbidden inside the cave churches. There is a konak below where pilgrims can stay overnight, and a simple canteen. Allow two hours from the lower monastery, more if you walk. The view from the terrace over the Bjelopavlici plain is worth as much time as the churches. The Lower Monastery has its own church with nineteenth-century frescoes and a spring, and most visitors walk straight past it.