Urbanization of our Planet started long ago, and it is still under way, and we look at it as a continuous change of the civil image of the world. Some polises have completely disappeared, we know them only by name and place where they used to be, some are evidenced by stone wall ruins or remnants of buried foundations, some have been extended, and some have become states. The word polis originally designated a fortress, a castle secured by a wall, a fortified castle and, today, it means a settlement, a civil, trading and cultural center of a region or state.
Among polises/towns/cities there are also those, such as the town of Budva, which are not fully defined by any of the above determinants. Yes, the fortress and wall ruins stand there even today, persistently and stoutly, at the same place since way back in the 9th century, which have resisted so many armies that attacked them both from the sea and from the land. They stand, although they were shaken by earthquakes and quivering several times. Today, it is also the fortress theater. The stage for numerous miraculous theatrical events. It is a settlement, and a municipal center, but nowhere in those determinants it says that its population in summer months increases a hundred times, and we know it is true. None of them even indicated that it is the town that adopts its passers by. Even more than that, the town that liberates. However, that was expressed way back in the old Charter of the Town of Budva from the times of the Nemanjić family, which was, as a relic, transcribed by the learned Budva’s authors in almost all generations: Krsto Ivanović in 1635, Stefan Mitrov Ljubiša in 1854, and there is also the third preserved transcript. One important provision of the Charter reads: “If a man of the emperor, or of a squire, comes to Budva with the desire to settle in it, he is not obliged to serve anybody but the Municipality”. “In case”, it says further in the Charter, “that an inhabitant of Budva, a Slav or Albanian, enslaves such a man, he is obliged to pay to the emperor 50 perpers, and to set that man free”. By acquiring citizenship in the town of Budva any newcomer was, consequently, saved from slavery and vassalage, because he came in the fold of a free town.
It is hard to say whether the law in this case confirmed the already existing good custom or the statutory provision in time developed in a custom by consistent enforcement. In either case, it is the same today. Who once comes to Budva, becomes a free inhabitant of Budva and keeps returning to that town as his/her chosen hometown, because he/she is attracted and tied to it by a secret force, which is built in the fortress, in the stone foundations of churches, in the wall ruins that protect the town from winds, in Ljubiša’s novels, in the poems of Krsto Ivanović, in the paintings of the Bocarić brothers, and adventures of Zanović. We are not given to fully decipher that secret power, but the only thing we know: there are states, there are forts, there are polises, and Budva is, Budva. |
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