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Paper short abstract

This paper provides an ethnographic account of how a particular emic mode of narrating and 'placing' urban history figures within the ongoing minority struggle against its marginalization by the state.

Paper long abstract

Miguel Cervantes, Sabbatai Zevi, German tourists and Josip Broz Tito do have something in common. As "grand visitors" they represent nodal points within a prominent emic narrative of the history of Ulqin/Ulcinj - the Montenegrin most southern and recent harbour (1878) with the Albanian (Muslim) minority representing more than 70% of the population.

By exploring the stories and places of the "grand visits" the paper shows how historicity - as "an ongoing production of pasts and futures" (Hirsch and Stewart 2005) - figures within the contemporary struggle of Ulqin's/Ulcinj's inhabitants against the marginalization by the state. The figures of the "grand visitors" and the re-discovered places associated with them - each in its particular way - enable a narrative "up-scaling" and revaluation of the marginal position Ulcinj embodies both in the Ottoman and the present-day Montenegrin context. Abandoned hotels, a hidden saint's tomb (turbe) and a stone in the Old Town - at first site radically different places - all represent traces of "a moving history" and as such are central to local debates, story-telling and heritage initiatives. Apart from opposing a common orientalization/balkanization of Ulqin/Ulcinj and it populationas "non-modern" and "backward", the place-making narrative of "grand visits" is a crucial component of the local struggle of the Albanian minority for (re)claiming Ulqin's/Ulcinj's image not only as the hub of Montenegrin tourism, but moreover as a locus of cosmopolitanism, 'centrality' and connectedness.