Like many walled cities, Kotor is a tight maze of dim passageways that open onto small plazas and squares, many of them built around a church or, less celestially, a water well. Cars, which are banned, simply wouldn't fit in the streets: Some streets are so narrow that I can stand in the middle and touch the stone houses on either side. Cats seem to serve as a secondary police force, hanging out on underpopulated corners and keeping a gem-eyed watch over the foot traffic. It is all very old Old World, but Kotor, despite its age, is well preserved. An earthquake severely damaged the town in 1979, but Tito, in one of his final gestures of Yugoslav unity, levied a tax across his republics to rebuild Kotor—the city that forever rebuffed the Turks.

"What's important to remember," my guide, Dragana, tells me, "is that even though Kotor had these many rulers, the city was never sacked and its citizens never fled." In other words, each new administration imported its own culture, blending it with what was here before. Dragana makes her point about the mille-feuille of culture by showing me Venice's winged lion outside Kotor's main gate and a Viennese villa done up in cool blues and whites. She herself seems to represent the truth of this: She has a Slavic face, all cheekbones and sharp chin; speaks in the Serbian tongue; and lives in a house probably originally built by the Byzantines.

I keep this in mind as I ponder my original question at a Turkish bakery, where I have a small brick of buttery corn bread followed by a shot of silty coffee. The woman behind the counter wears a rose head scarf and shouts my order in Turkish to her husband in the kitchen. Her ancestors never managed to take Kotor, but her coffee and corn bread seem nicely bivouacked within the city walls. For some five hundred years, the Ottoman presence on the Balkan peninsula was so overwhelming that the few places the Turks failed to capture are revered in local lore. Rebecca West, author of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the greatest travelogue on the region, noted acidly in 1940, "The Turks ruined the Balkans, with a ruin so great that it has not yet been repaired and may prove irreparable."

All of this clarifies an important distinction between Montenegro and its neighbors: Montenegro never fully lost itself to the Turks. Everyone else may have raised a flag in Kotor, but never the widely loathed Ottomans, who were among history's worst administrators of empire. To you or me this might seem like a colorful footnote, but in the Balkans—as the world saw in the 1990s—the trough of memory runs long and deep, and often bright with blood. Mention 1875 to any Montenegrin over the age of, say, ten and you will almost certainly be greeted with a gleam of pride in the eye. That's the year Montenegro's mountain tribes led a rebellion that finally kicked the Ottomans out of the Balkans after nearly five hundred years of occupation. This was a watershed event in European history; Tennyson even wrote a poem memorializing the Montenegrins' victory: "O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne / Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm / Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years."