Skadar Lake's island monasteries: Beška, Kom, Starčevo and Grmožur

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the lake sat at the centre of Zeta, the medieval Serbian principality that became Montenegro. Islands offered what mainland sites could not: defensibility, isolation for monastic life, and control of the water routes between the interior and the Adriatic trade towns.

What survives is a scattering of small stone churches, refectories and cemeteries, some restored and inhabited by a handful of monks or nuns, others quietly returning to scrub. Visiting them is less about architecture than about the strangeness of arriving somewhere that has had no road for six hundred years.

• Beška — two churches, the larger endowed in the early fifteenth century by Jelena Balšić, daughter of Prince Lazar. Today a small community of nuns. The most atmospheric landing on the lake.
• Kom — a fourteenth-century monastery on a low wooded island, restored and occupied. Frescoes in poor but moving condition.
• Starčevo — the oldest of the three, founded by a hermit monk in the 1370s and a centre of manuscript copying. Quiet, rarely visited, usually reachable only by private charter.
• Grmožur — not a monastery but a nineteenth-century Ottoman-built fortress later used by Montenegro as a prison, nicknamed the Montenegrin Alcatraz. Currently visited from the water rather than landed on.

All four require a boat, and specifically a boat with the range to cross the open southern basin. Wooden boats working the northern channels do not go there. A three to four hour sport-boat charter is the minimum; five hours if you want more than one landing plus a swim.

Landing depends on water level. In spring the lake is high and jetties are usable; by late August the level can drop several metres and some approaches become too shallow. Ask your operator the day before rather than assuming.

That schedule only fits on a private boat. The private all-over-the-lake boat tour is built around exactly this kind of range, which is why it is the standard recommendation for anyone whose main goal is the islands.