Montenegro's northernmost city — a coal-town plateau with an Ottoman mosque that shouldn't exist this far north
Pljevlja is Montenegro's northernmost city, at 770m on a plateau in the country's least-visited corner near the Bosnia and Serbia borders. It is almost never on tourist itineraries — it's an industrial coal-mining town with a thermal power plant — but it contains one of the most unexpected architectural surprises in the western Balkans: the Husein-Pasha Mosque (1569), with a minaret rising 42m against the mountain backdrop, one of the finest intact Ottoman mosques in the region. The surrounding countryside is mountain river country: the Tara, Lim, and Ćehotina rivers all begin in the surround…
Pljevlja (historically Taşlıca under Ottoman rule) was a major Ottoman administrative and trade centre in the 16th and 17th centuries — one of the most important towns in the Sandžak of Herzegovina. The Husein-Pasha Mosque was built by the Ottoman grand vizier Koca Sinan Pasha in 1569 and named for a local commander. The town declined significantly after Montenegro captured it in 1912 following the First Balkan War. The coal deposits in the surrounding hills were developed during the Yugoslav period, when Pljevlja became an industrial town — the thermal power plant built in 1982 supplies a si…