As a reward for its valor, the Great Powers invited Montenegro to sit at the adults' table of nations for the first time, and at the 1878 Congress of Berlin, Montenegro earned the right to declare its independence—a prize that was revoked in 1919 when the maps were redrawn in the mirrored halls of Versailles. Imagine the wounded national pride. After World War I, Montenegro disappeared from European cartography. She would have to wait until 2006 to find herself again on the map.

Google Montenegro Travel and you'll quickly come upon hyperbole: Montenegro is the new Croatia! Montenegro is the new Dubai!—statements obviously concocted for a press release. I've been in the country two days and I know this much: Montenegro is not the new Croatia, which, if I remember correctly, was only recently branded the new Italy; and a country whose biggest building is an aluminum plant is, thankfully, years from being compared to Dubai. All of this blather is in reference to Montenegro's Adriatic coast, which runs south from the entrance to the Bay of Kotor down to Ulcinj, a mostly Muslim town near the Albanian border. The guidebooks (I should say book, since there's really only one) refer to this region as a Riviera—a name, I soon find out, in need of revision. The first stop on the coast is Budva, about an hour from Kotor. It too was once a walled city, built by the Venetians, limestone fortifications plunging into the sea on three sides. Today the old town is intact, but to reach it, I have to drive past concrete apartment blocks and by-the-week hotels and then a lifeless shopping center, its crashing-wave neon sign on the blink. After two thousand years of valiant self-defense, Montenegro's Riviera is losing badly to a new band of invaders: developers armed with rubles and cement.

In the 1950s and '60s, when the Serbs ruled the Balkans from Belgrade, many of Tito's bureaucrats would come down here for their two weeks. Picking up where the Central Committee left off, in the last few years Russian developers, rich from petrodollars, have descended upon Montenegro's coast. With seemingly few regulations, they have bought up the same patches of land that Montenegro's patriots defended for centuries. "For hundreds of years our ancestors spilled their blood for this territory," a student from Podgorica complained to me a few days later. "Now we're selling it off for a few rubles. And this time there's no getting it back." The young man, trim in knockoff Adidas, noted the irony of this happening simultaneously with independence. "We tell ourselves we're free, but look at who owns our most valuable land."

Once inside Budva's ancient walls, however, the historic remains. A labyrinth of limestone alleys leads to the citadel on the town's western front. I don't know why, but I'm a sucker for a citadel—the rampart walls three feet thick, the dark staircases spiraling toward the sky, the turrets that smell of cat urine. Certainly there is something touching about a town going to such lengths for its defense, as if the locals were pessimistic at the core and knew that one day the enemy would land. Atop Budva's ramparts, I find myself alone, watching the Adriatic crash against the walls. The day is gray and windy, and the dark sea flushes with foam and a couple of plastic shopping bags. The little beach outside the city walls is empty, the rentable chairs blown about, the two-star hotels blocking what was once a glorious view. In Budva it is clear the enemy has landed. And so, back to my original question, or a variation of it: Is this Montenegro? Is this the sad image that should lead off my dispatch?