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.