Getting To Know Montenegro

First, apologies that it's been so long since I made a post.

 

Now here is are some random "did you know?"s about Montenegro

Montenegro is the Latin name for the country, but the people here call it Crna Gora (which also means black mountain).

Montenegro was an independent kingdom early last century, though some parts of it's modern territory were ruled by the Ottoman and Austrian empires

Around the first world war Serbia incorporated MNE into it's domain. The royal family was exiled to France where they still live.

After the second world war it was part of Yugoslavia

When Yugoslavia was dismantled, it remained with Serbia until 2006, when it became an independent nation again.

The official language is Montenegrin, which is closely related to Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian (just think of the differences between the English spoken in US, Great Britain and Australia for example).

According to Wikipedia, only about 45% of the population is actually Montenegrin and about 29% is Serbian. Just under 9% is from Bosnia.

The population is just under 630,000 as of the 2011 census. 

The size of the country is 5019 square miles (just a bit smaller that Connecticut, whose population is over 3 1/2 million).

Here is an approximate breakdown of the religious affiliations of the people here: 60% Orthodox Christian, 30% Muslim, 8% Catholic Christian. The remainder includes Mormons, Jehovah's Witness, Seventh Day Adventists, and "other." Evangelical Protestant Christian makes up less than one tenth of one percent-about 200 total.

Since the majority of population is Orthodox, that is the calendar that is followed, so today, January 7th is actually Christmas.

And as a fun fact, Santa (here called Deda Mraz-Grandfather Frost) is associated with New Year's rather than Christmas-this is common in some former communist countries.