Museum Maritimum (Grgurin Palace and Maritime Museum), Kotor

Kotor’s maritime heritage is presented in an early-18th-century Baroque palace, the Grgurina Palace, which today houses the Maritime Museum of Montenegro. Spread across three exhibition floors, the museum explores the city’s long relationship with the sea through photographs, paintings, uniforms, finely crafted weapons, navigational instruments, and detailed ship models. An audio guide helps place these objects within their historical and cultural context.

Kotor’s seafaring tradition reaches back to the Middle Ages and is closely linked to the Boka Navy, a maritime brotherhood traditionally dated to 809. The museum preserves the memory of generations of sailors and captains, alongside shipbuilders, craftsmen, artists, politicians, and diplomats whose activities connected the Adriatic with both the eastern Mediterranean and Western Europe.

Among the highlights are six bronze relief panels illustrating key historical events and figures from Kotor’s often turbulent past. The collection also includes nautical charts, geographic maps, engravings, and watercolors depicting coastal towns of the bay, as well as an ethnographic section that offers insight into maritime life between the 16th and 18th centuries, a period when Kotor reached the height of its seafaring influence.

At the entrance to the palace, look for two small historic cannons, a reminder of the constant threat of piracy in Adriatic waters and the defensive role seafarers were forced to assume. Together, the building and its collections provide a compact but detailed overview of how deeply maritime life shaped Kotor’s identity.