Manastir Stanjevići

Manastir Stanjevići sits at roughly 800 metres on the southern slopes of Lovćen above the village of Pobori, reached by a winding mountain road inland from Budv…Manastir Stanjevići sits at roughly 800 metres on the southern slopes of Lovćen above the village of Pobori, reached by a winding mountain road inland from Budva. Tradition attributes the original foundation to the 14th-century nobleman Nikola Stanjević of Emperor Stefan Dušan's court. After the 1714 Ottoman raid on Cetinje, Vladika Danilo I Petrović moved his seat here and rebuilt the church and dwellings, with a major 1725 reconstruction backed by Russian financial aid.

From the early 18th century until 1839 the property served as the second residence of the Montenegrin metropolitans and a spiritual-political centre of the Petrović dynasty, with Petar I Petrović-Njegoš living here regularly and the General Code of Montenegro and the Hills, the country's first legal code, adopted at an 1798 assembly held on site. Petar II Petrović-Njegoš sold the complex to the Austrian authorities in 1839, who converted it into a fortified border-patrol station garrisoned by around twenty soldiers. Further damage came in the 1869 Boka uprising and the 1979 Montenegro earthquake; reconstruction began in 1994 and the monastery is again a functioning Orthodox community, modest in scale, with the katholikon dedicated to the Holy Trinity and two principal iconostasis icons painted in 1738 by hieromonk Maksim Tujković.