“We want that one”, July 2008

I've never much liked rollercoasters. Two minutes of agony and fear for a few seconds of thrills – that’s not my kind of ratio. It’s an especially poor imbalance if you’re talking about buying a house in Montenegro. After making our offer on the house and getting ready to leave Monte for Budapest and then the UK (for just four days) we set about finding ourselves the appropriate people to help turn water into wine. We found ourselves a lawyer (who we shall call Grezko), we had words with a stone and wood meistor (Raša) and even got in touch with an electrician/plumber (Ivica) who also happened to be the head Virpazar utilities contractor. As usual, this has occurred not through the usual process of looking someone up on the internet as we might do in the UK, but by asking around in town. There’s always someone who knows someone, or who is godfather to someone else who does; it’s that Montenegrin two degrees of separation again. Ivica turned out to be an especially useful guy, informing us that the house we’d just agreed to buy was going to be 100m below the town’s new kanalizacija extension – in other words, it’d be connected to the mains water supply later that year, saving us the troublesome problem of how to pump and then store a household’s worth of water 30 metres up a hill from a bubbling spring at the bottom of our garden. With the mains connected it should just be a case of letting gravity bring us all the natural spring water we needed. It was an unexpected bonus.

Safe in the knowledge that the first few steps were being taken to process the paperwork on the house, we went off and relaxed on a cute little beach just south of Budva (the coast is a mere 20 minutes away by car from the lake). It had been recommended to us by Doctor Dean, who told us it was well away from the Russian crowds.

“But be careful!” he warned us playfully. “Do not be upset by the sight of naked people!”

He wasn’t wrong.

Basic dos and don’ts for English people on nudist beaches:

Do
- Take your clothes off. Seems silly to mention it, but if the beach is outside of the main resorts, it’s perfectly acceptable.
- Find a nice little spot that’s a decent distance away from others. Stretching yourself out right by the entrance to the beach so that everyone has to step around you is poor form.
- Put on some sun-cream. Trust me, if these bits of you are seeing the sun for the first time, it’ll hurt if you don’t…
- Put your clothes back on if you’re heading for the bar. If you don’t you’ll soon feel foolish
Don’t
- Be surprised when you get stared at. After all, the locals will naturally be curious at your blindingly white skin…
- Gawp at the particularly fit men/women. Instead, wear very dark sunglasses. That way you can cast oblique glances with impunity.
- Feel too embarrassed. After a while you’ll realise that no-one really cares. Unless you’re one of the aforementioned particularly fit people, in which case don’t…
- Forget anyone wearing dark glasses will be checking you out.

Following our “day off”, we had to get back on the house-buying wagon. Having fallen hard for the house in question and haggled to an agreed price over four or five days, we subsequently suffered one of those aforementioned up-and-down 24 hours which rather resembled a graph of the Sterling’s recent performance. Things started off looking really good from the morning on but then unexpectedly plummeted headlong into an abyss around 4pm and pulled back to something vaguely approaching stability by the next morning. First came the previous evening’s visit of Janko, the geometar. A geometar’s business is to measure and survey the land of the plot in question, compare it to the notes in the local kataster (where all ownership details are archived), and then inform the potential purchasers (us) exactly what we were buying. The vendor, a simple boatman called Slaviša, had already outlined to us around 1200 metres of land sitting directly below the house that was part of the plot; in the presence of the geometar, however, we were delighted to find that the plot was apparently double the size we had thought, with several more levels and tiers included in the price. The following morning came our conversation with Ivica and the revelation that the house would soon – contrary to what we had thought - have a mains water connection. We could scarcely believe our luck.

The afternoon quickly derailed any sunny thoughts we might have been having about the process being smooth and painless. On reception of Janko’s report that afternoon, we discovered not only that Slaviša had got in a muddle about the property’s boundaries and allocated rather more land to the plot than was actually the case (one important parcel belonged to an aunt), but that according to the kataster papers neither Slaviša nor his brother were actually the legal owners of any of it. Instead, the title deeds to “our” plot and those surrounding it were shared between his mother and three other members of her family.

We should have guessed. When buying property in this part of the world, the first thing you should do is ask to see a copy of the kataster papers. Essentially, you need the consent of every official owner to make a sale and have so-called 1/1, or “clean” papers. We knew this from buying our house in Croatia four years previously. We knew this from every piece of advice there was to read about buying in Montenegro. And this was the one thing we hadn’t actually asked for. On this occasion we had simply taken it for granted that Slaviša knew exactly what he was doing rather than asking for the written proof. So Janko called Slaviša on our behalf. Slaviša’s explanation was that the whole had been divided informally among the members of his family and that his mother had ceded her informal share – “our” plot – to him and his brother. The kataster, however, told a different story, and unless the two accounts matched, there was apparently no legal way for any of us to proceed. Emma and I listened aghast as several further telephone calls were made, the worst of which was when our lawyer Grezko called Slaviša to ask what was going on. The conversation lasted only a few minutes, during which Grezko merely grunted and made dismissive hand gestures. Grezko hung up, unimpressed.

“If what he says is true then the simple fact is the house is not for sale,” he said, shrugging his massive shoulders (did we tell you they build them big here in Montenegro?). “Without all four signatures or a written statement which allows Slaviša to negotiate for all of them, I can proceed with this no further.”

We slumped in our chairs and stared impassively into the distance. Grezko clearly knew the law, but his brusque manner had already alienated us and now, it seemed, also Slaviša. We explained that Slaviša was a simple guy who seemed genuine to us, even if he had made a rather large mistake about the property’s boundaries, but Grezko was having none of it.

“He is probably illiterate and one of those guys who just drinks all day and is trying to trick you,” he concluded. We were a bit non-plussed. Grezko had been on the British Embassy’s list of English-speaking lawyers, hence our meeting, but he seemed unwilling to help us investigate the situation further, which as we understood it was part of his job as our appointed advocat. Our drive back from the café in Bar to Virpazar was a long and silent one. We had, it seemed, naively commissioned a €500 survey before checking that the papers were in order. That was that. If Grezko was right, Slaviša had no right to sell the house. It was over.

Except, of course, it wasn’t, mainly thanks to the splendid Dean, who we figured might be able to illuminate the darker corners of this business. We spoke to him. He spoke to Slaviša’s godfather (who had contacted him initially to discuss putting Slaviša in touch with us), Slaviša’s godfather asked Slaviša to speak to Dean, Dean spoke to Slaviša and Slaviša insisted that he very much did have the written permission of all four family members to act on their behalf, and could ensure that they would all sign the agreement individually if necessary. We called Grezko, he spoke to Dean, and Grezko confirmed that as long as Slaviša delivered said document and it passed legal scrutiny, the possibility of a sale was very much back on again. How we would sort out the parcel belonging to the aunt was a question only worth posing thereafter.

“Slaviša will come over tomorrow morning,” Dean told us, “and we will then get everything straight, one way or another.”

Not for the first time, Dean was right. Slaviša turned up the next morning with some paperwork showing nothing we didn’t already know, but again insistent that there should be no problem and that his mother, two of her sisters and his cousin – the “official” owners – had already agreed to the sale and would sign any agreement. He also promised to get his cousin to agree to sell the “missing” parcel of land to us, and that he would organise the compensation out of the agreed purchase price. We had guessed, rightly, that he had not been happy with the way that Grezko had spoken to him, a feeling shared not just with us but also with Dean. Instead, with our departure for Budapest looming later in the day, Dean called Raša, and within minutes Raša had popped over to confirm that we could speak to his lawyer, Dubravka.

“She has already had plenty of experience getting co-signatories together for other house purchasers in the area,” Dean explained, half translating as we listened to Raša. This sounded much the better option. We wanted someone with a can-do attitude rather than Grezko’s methods. This was not going to as straightforward a process as we had first thought, and it still might prove un-workable, but we did at least want someone in our corner prepared to give it a go. Thankfully, Dubravka proved as helpful, knowledgeable and co-operative as Grezko was obstinate.

“Yes, there are some issues to resolve,” she admitted, “but I have handled far more difficult cases than this, like with eight different “owners” who were not even speaking to each other, let alone ready to sign a contract! As long as I have the agreement of all four owners that they are prepared to sell what you have agreed with Slaviša, there should be no problem.”

The only caveat she added was that the extra parcel might need a separate agreement in the form of an addendum, but overall her approach was the proverbial breath of fresh air compared to what we had encountered the previous day. Emma and I signed the Power of Attorney documents and left for Budapest with our fingers crossed that, as a good friend once put it, Heywood’s law would come into operation: That everything that could go wrong would eventually come right.

Well, that's the plan, anyway...

And we had promised each other that we wouldn’t rush into anything this time…