After almost two decades of joining to the island of St Nikola by throwing hundreds of cubic meters of rock and concrete blocks into the sea by the businessman from Belgrade Nenad Djordjevic, with no approval from the authorized state agencies, the small island of Skoljic is free again.
The members of the local community have excavated the former natural passage between these two islands and thus enabled the former natural passage of sea currents.
Thus, as the member of the Council of the local community "Old Town" Stefan Bozovic said, the enormous damage that was done to the submarine and the whole aquarium of Budva Bay has been corrected because the merging of the two islands completely disrupted the biodiversity.
Bozovic stated that they had a great deal of help from the current beach tenant on the island, the company "Yachteagle" from Podgorica and their executive director Vukota Odovic, who are ready to completely free the natural passage after the season with a construction plant, as there are plenty of concrete blocks and large stones which are impossible to be removed now.
Twenty years ago, Djordjevic, a former high official of JUL, bought three hectares at the southern end of the island from an old-town family, after which he began extensive construction work. In addition to building a few stone objects on the island without any approval, which had been removed by inspection in 2002 and construction was stopped, he had dredged 400 meters of beach and then merged Skoljic, destroying one of the touristic and natural attractions.
Concrete blocks will be removed in autumn (Photo: Vuk Lajovic)
Concrete blocks will be removed in autumn. The newly-appointed council of the local community has now launched an action to alleviate the consequences of this devastation of the natural environment. "We, several fishermen, have gone to the tenants on the island and asked whether they can meet our demands and open the natural passage between Skoljic. They were willing to help us and excavated with their plant as far as they could. Now it can be passed through there by swimming, but by boat, it's still impossible. We agreed to clean it up completely in September and return it to the previous state. They have nothing against excavating the passage and they immediately supported our action. Every summer they had problems, because the tourists who climb to Skoljic used to fall and they were often injured," Bozovic pointed out.
Opening of this passage, as he said, is important not only to be a tourist attraction again, but because of the flow of the sea.
"Much more important is to enable the sea flow. “Tunja”, or the shallow sea that connects the Slovenian beach and Skolj, has been disrupted since the natural passage was blocked. You know, as soon as you "touch nature," you put something where it doesn’t belong, it reflects on another place, instead of sand filling the beach, it is now placed on another location," Bozovic said.
Murava - the lungs of the underwater are in extinction
Bozovic said that one of the consequences of the closure of the natural passage is that the seagrass of Posidonia oceanica, the so-called murava, is lost from the entire belt of Budva Bay.
"Murava, as we call it, is an indicator of the seawater quality and is a habitat for many other species. It needs pure water, flow. Unfortunately, it has been lost at many places. It is known that Posidonia is the lungs of the underwater. Murava is protected by numerous world, European and national laws as the priority habitat of the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, almost exclusively as a result of human activity, murava is being extinct throughout the Mediterranean," Bozovic said.
Text by Vuk Lajovic, on July 4th, 2019, read more at Vijesti
