King Nikola’s palace in Bar-the diplomatic powerhouse of Montenegro’s ruling class, now a stunning museum with interesting stories and history
King Nichola’s Palace was built in 1885, on the coast. The palace consists of a large castle, a small castle, chapels, sentry boxes, and winter gardens. In 1910 was added the spacious ballroom. Within the castle, there is a park with a variety of Mediterranean plants (among other things, cork tree).
In front of the castle, a wooden pier was built, which was used for docking ships and yachts, where King Nikola greeted and escorted important figures who visited Bar.
In the period from 1866 to 1916 and owned ten yachts. One of them, “Sybil” bought from novelist Jules Verne, and his last Yacht “Rumija” was sunk in 1915 on the site of today’s city marina by the Austro-Hungarian gunboats. King Nichola’s palace also has a hothouse of rust-proof construction, a gift of the Italian King Emanuel, which today serves as a restaurant called “The Prince’s Garden”.
Today King Nichola’s palace is a museum. Over time, the royal residence underwent several important reconstructions. The most recent alterations took place on the occasion of celebrating the Golden Jubilee in 1910 when the building obtained its final appearance. The newly established State Museum (current King Nikola’s Museum) gathered the material from the Military Museum and the National Museum, the institutions created in the nineteenth century, as well as the entire preserved inventory from the Montenegrin dynastic residences. Thus, from the very beginning of its work, it gathered in one place the most important museum material on the political, military, and cultural history of Montenegro that records the state-building developments in a continuous and complex manner, from the medieval beginnings to 1918, when Montenegro as an independent country disappears from the political map of Europe.
History and Culture
The museum’s collection is rich in remnants of cultural-historical collections of old Montenegrin museums. During the renovation of the building, most of the attention was put into the reconstruction of the residence of King Nicholas I and the residence have kept its authenticity to date.
The museum contains collections of important paintings, an ethnographic collection, a collection of war trophies (flags and weapons), coin and stamp collections, a collection of photos and archaeological objects.
