What happened
The epicentre was offshore, between Bar and Ulcinj. Around a hundred people were killed in Montenegro and about thirty-five more in Albania. Roughly a hundred thousand people were left without homes, and something close to a quarter of the country's housing stock was damaged or destroyed.
The coast dropped. In places the land subsided by up to a metre, which permanently changed the shoreline and put some pre-earthquake quaysides underwater.
What was rebuilt and what survived
| Place | What you are looking at |
|---|---|
| Budva old town | Largely reconstructed. Walls, houses and much else rebuilt through the 1980s. |
| Kotor old town | Damaged and repaired rather than rebuilt. More original fabric survives. |
| Ulcinj old town | Heavily damaged, substantially rebuilt |
| Perast | Damaged; palaces repaired over decades, some still ruined |
| Sveti Stefan | Damaged and restored |
| Stari Bar | Already a ruin; further damaged |
| Herceg Novi | Damaged, repaired |
How to see it
Once you know, the tells are easy. In reconstructed sections the mortar is too even, the stone too uniform in colour and size, the corners too sharp. Original walls have irregular coursing, patched repairs from different centuries, and stones worn into curves.
In Budva, look at the base of the citadel walls against the houses above — the lower courses are older. In Kotor, the same test mostly fails, because most of it is genuinely old.
The reconstruction itself
It was a Yugoslav federal effort on a large scale, with UNESCO involvement because Kotor and its bay were inscribed as World Heritage in 1979 — the same year, and partly *because* of the earthquake, which put the site on the List of World Heritage in Danger until 2003.
The work was done to a high standard by the conservation practice of the time. Whether rebuilding a medieval town from photographs produces the same thing is a question people who work in heritage still argue about, and standing in Budva is a reasonable place to have an opinion.
Why it matters now
Two reasons a visitor might care. First, it explains the texture of the coast — why some places feel worn and some feel restored. Second, it explains the building stock: the concrete apartment blocks that back most coastal towns date largely from the reconstruction and the decade after it, which is why the architecture jumps from medieval to 1980s with almost nothing in between.
It also explains why the region takes seismic building codes seriously. This is an active zone and 1979 is within living memory for a great many people here.
