Kotor's culture runs deeper than its walls: Boka's shipwrights funded Baroque palaces, its captains commissioned Venetian silversmiths, and its parishes still sing 15th-century Bokelji songs. Three days of museums, icons, galleries and stone.
The upper-floor treasury holds Boka's greatest goldsmithing: the gilded silver reliquary of St. Tryphon, 14th-century Venetian and Kotoran silver hands and heads, and a Byzantine-influenced painted crucifix. Open 09:00-19:00 summer.
Built 1195 in Romanesque-Byzantine transition, this small church served Catholic and Orthodox congregations simultaneously for two centuries — it kept two altars. Fragments of 12th-century fresco survive on the south wall; the floor is paved with medieval gravestones.
A 1221 Romanesque basilica on a 6th-century Christian foundation, with the glass sarcophagus of Blessed Osanna of Kotor, the 15th-century Dominican mystic who was walled into a cell beside the church for 52 years. Excavated early-Christian mosaics visible under glass.
Kotor's Baroque civic architecture at street level: the Pima palace's 1667 balcony, carried on stone brackets by two angels, was rebuilt after the great earthquake by Korčula stonemasons. Walk Trg od Brašna to Trg od Oružja reading the Venetian lions and family crests.
Housed in the Grgurina Palace, three floors of Boka's seafaring: captains' portraits, ship models, Venetian navigational instruments, weapons, and the embroidered costumes of the Boka Navy. Open 09:00-18:00 summer, shorter in winter.
Kotor's municipal contemporary gallery, formed from artworks donated by artists worldwide after the 1979 earthquake. Rotating exhibitions of Montenegrin painters and photographers in a restored stone hall near the north gate.
The Orthodox parish keeps a working collection of Boka-school icons from the 17th-19th centuries — the Rafailović-Dimitrijević family of Risan painters who fused Cretan Byzantine models with Venetian colour. Ask at the sacristy for access.
From July to August the Arms Square becomes an open-air auditorium for the Don Branko Music Days classical programme, plus the international theatre and children's festival. Chamber concerts also run inside St. Tryphon and the Clock Tower square.
Twelve kilometres up the bay, this 1694 Baroque palace holds Perast's captains' portraits, flags, and relics of the Bokelji naval republic that sent sailors to Venice and Russia. The waterfront terrace looks straight at the two islets.
An artificial island built by sailors dropping stones for 500 years. Inside: 68 ceiling paintings by Tripo Kokolja, the great Baroque painter of Boka, and a votive tapestry embroidered by Jacinta Kunić-Mijović with her own hair over 25 years.
The unfinished 1616 campanile of Perast's parish church, meant to be the bay's tallest, stops at 55 metres. Its treasury keeps the standards of the Boka Navy and the sword of the Perast captains who defended the bay against Ottoman raids.
The smallest of Kotor's squares, still residential — laundry lines, cats, and locals playing cards. Cafés here serve Vranac and Krstač from Montenegrin cellars, and the Bokeljska mornarica choir sometimes rehearses in the nearby parish halls.