Pljevlja lies in a high basin in the north of Montenegro, an hour or so from the great canyon of the Tara and the peaks of Durmitor, and it is a town that people rarely visit on purpose. It has a coal mine and a power station, and in winter smoke can hang in the valley. But the old centre has two buildings that deserve a stop, the Husein-pasha mosque, a sixteenth-century Ottoman building with a tall slender minaret and painted interior, and the Holy Trinity monastery, with its fine iconostasis, carved by local craftsmen in the nineteenth century. The mix of mosque and church a few minutes apart says a lot about this part of the Balkans.
Grčko groblje, the name of this stop, means Greek cemetery in Serbian and Montenegrin, though the name is a folk one that did not need to mean Greek. In the Balkans such names are used for old burial grounds of unknown origin, and in this region they are often medieval necropolises with stećci, the large carved limestone tombstones of the Middle Ages, which UNESCO listed in 2016 across Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia. They are slabs and chests, sometimes decorated with figures of horsemen, crescents and spirals, standing in grass among sheep, and there is a quiet melancholy about them.
Pljevlja, with about nineteen thousand people, has fuel, a market and a few cafes, and Sokolovo Brdo is a tiny hamlet nearby with little more. Fill up in town, particularly before heading into the mountains, where stations are rare. The riding is excellent on the high roads, with long bends over open grassland and pine forest, wide skies and light traffic, though surfaces can be broken, with frost heave and potholes after winter.
The northern Montenegrin highlands are cold, with snow from November to April, and mist sits in the valleys. Late spring and September are the best seasons, when the meadows are green, the sky is clear and the air smells of hay. Try a plate of kačamak, the local cornmeal and cheese dish, and kajmak, a thick cream, with fresh bread, in one of the roadside restaurants, and expect warm hospitality and strong coffee.