It's small (about the size of Connecticut), scrappy, and sublimely beautiful—a country whose dramatic landscapes of brooding black mountains and jewel-toned oceans have attracted two thousand years of invaders, fortune seekers, and now tourists. David Ebershoff goes in search of the real Montenegro and finds a place where the crumbling grandeur of old Europe brushes against the vitality of the new

We'll start from the mountaintop. I am 1,350 steps above the small city of Kotor, the crown jewel on Montenegro's coast. From here, through an early-autumn mist, Kotor looks like a fortified town in a game of toy soldiers, and my perspective is that of the invader: hovering, looming, waiting. The city sits on a strategic triangle of littoral, protected by the Bay of Kotor to the west; the Škurda River—the silver, flashing, streaming home to the two pink trout that I will devour later in my journey—to the east; and, to the south, the rocky little fortress of St. Ivan, where I'm standing upon a crumbling rampart in the rain. In one glance, I can assess the whole city. The rooftops are waves of red pantiles. The churches and houses are a pale-gray local limestone that takes on an opalescent shimmer in the fog. Bell towers are ringing the hour, and the town's sturdy clock tower tilts slightly to the west. Most notable are the defensive walls surrounding Kotor—cube upon cube of hand-hacked stone, up to fifty-two feet thick at the base. The bulwarks look all but impenetrable, but for some two thousand years the walls of the city consistently failed to hold back her enemies. A roll call of the peoples and empires that came, saw, and pocketed Kotor reads like a syllabus from Intro to Western Civ: the Illyrians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Slavs, the Serbs (again and again—more on that later), the Hungarians, the Venetians, the Austrians, the Russians, Napoleon's France, the British for a few months in 1813, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and, briefly by proxy, the Soviet Union, before Josip Tito, as president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, broke with Stalin in 1948. In two thousand years, the only meddlers who failed to take Kotor were the fez-topped Turks.

But from up here, all that violent history feels very last millennium, especially when I spot the two cruise ships moored just outside the city walls.

On my way down, I think about the question that I hope to answer while here: What is Montenegro? Hollywood recently cast its klieg light on the country when James Bond played Texas Hold 'Em at the fictitious Casino Royale, but the one-room gambling joint I visited on my first night barely resembled a casino and my experience there was hardly royal: The blackjack table was empty, the Serbian dealer in cha-cha heels was falling asleep standing up, and I lost five euros in as many seconds playing video Reel 'Em In. This is not yet the land of Bond.

In 2006, Montenegro voted itself independent from Serbia. In doing so, it became the newest country in the world, taking the one hundred ninety-second seat at the UN. But what does it mean for a place with so much history to finally appear as itself on the map? And speaking of maps, it's difficult to think about Montenegro without considering her geography. Open a map of Europe, find Italy's ankle, and drag your finger across the Adriatic: There, you've landed in little Montenegro (it is about the size of Connecticut). If you want two words to describe Montenegro, here they are: mountains and sea. The country's 175-mile shoreline runs down the Adriatic from Catholic Croatia to Muslim Albania. The coastal region is Mediterranean in feel: Its summers are long; fish, olive oil, and wine are staples of the diet; and the orientation has always been to the West. The mountainous interior—from the air, much of Montenegro looks like a roiling ocean of stone—stretches east to the plains of Serbia. Here, the culture is of the highland: Winter arrives suddenly and can last deep into spring; sheep and goats are revered for their wool and cheese; and historically, the mountain people were warriors who used the cliffs and the ravines and the murderous cold as weapons in their never-ending defense against onslaughts from the east.