Podgorica Audio Tours

Podgorica was bombed more than 80 times during the Second World War, which is why most of what you see dates from after 1945, when it was rebuilt as Titograd, the Yugoslav city honouring the partisan leader who had liberated it. The name reverted to Podgorica in 1992 when Yugoslavia dissolved, but the socialist-era architecture did not disappear with the name: wide boulevards, modernist public buildings, and a pedestrian zone that moves with a purpose the old town's Ottoman-era cobblestones cannot quite match.

Before any of that, the city sat at the confluence of the Moraca and Ribnica rivers under Ottoman rule from 1474 onward, and the remains of those four centuries are visible if you know where to look.

The Clock Tower, or Sahat kula, stands in the old town as a remnant of Ottoman civic time-keeping. The Ribnica Fortress ruins on the hill above the old quarter are fragmented but legible. The name Podgorica itself means 'under the hill,' a description that proved accurate across every political era the city inhabited.