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IN Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," a young woman finds herself shipwrecked on a strange coast. "What country, friends, is this?" she asks.

Scholars speculate — and I like to think — that she landed on the Adriatic coast of Montenegro, a place as little known to many people today as it was to Shakespeare's poor, lost Viola.

A few intrepid travelers came here for suntans and seafood in the Soviet era, when Montenegro was a part of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia and hotel rooms were a steal. But the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, of which Serbia and Montenegro were a part, in the early 1990s, followed by a dark decade of ethnic cleansing and war, virtually erased the region from the tourist map.

FOR THE RECORD:

Montenegrin church —An Oct. 2 article in the Travel section on Montenegro incorrectly identified the church atop the island Hotel Sveti Stefan as Greek Orthodox. It is Serbian Orthodox.

Now, with peace restored and all but two of the six republics that made up the former Yugoslavia independent, vacationers have started returning to the southern Balkans.

The coast of Croatia, just northwest of Montenegro, became Europe's hot beach spot a few years ago. Then — in the inevitable way of flash fame — it became increasingly crowded and pricey. Adventurous, cost-conscious vacationers began looking to forgotten little Montenegro, about the size of Connecticut and with a population of around 670,000.

Last spring, I clipped an item from the French newspaper Le Figaro touting Montenegro as the next eastern Mediterranean beach destination. The article promised haunting medieval towns like Kotor, rugged mountains, dreamy beaches and low prices compared with those on the French Riviera and Italy's Amalfi Coast.

I also was interested to learn that Montenegro enjoys a beach season that starts as early as April and lingers into October.

So, I reasoned, if I went in September, when most Europeans were back at work after summer vacation, I could return with a fresh, head-turning tan, not to mention leftover money.

But my four-day visit to Montenegro in early September was mostly due to Shakespeare, who depicted the country as a wild, romantic place where marvelous things can happen. Such things stick in the minds of travelers like me, who take trips to find out whether the real place resembles the imagined one. The truth is seldom unalloyed, as I discovered in Montenegro.

From the start, there were problems. I had only the vaguest notion of where the country was and couldn't locate a guidebook that covered it. I did find the website for the National Tourist Organization of Montenegro and then an office for Montenegro Airlines, from which I bought a round-trip ticket from Paris to Podgorica, Montenegro's administrative capital, about 40 miles from the coast.

The ticket agent gave me the name of a travel agency in Montenegro — Luminalis — that arranged my airport transfers and accommodations. I was offered a double at a small, new hotel in the seafront town of Sveti Stefan for about $60 a night.

The price was right, but I had my heart set on the most storied place on the coast, the Hotel Sveti Stefan, occupying its own little island and connected to the town by a causeway. It was formerly a medieval fortress, then a fishing village before it was converted into a hotel in the late 1950s. It briefly upstaged places like St. Tropez as a glamorous hideaway for such movie stars as Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor.

The travel agency warned me that the government-owned Hotel Sveti Stefan was no longer up to VIP snuff. But the price for a single, with breakfast and dinner, was about $130. That didn't seem too much, given that visitors who aren't hotel guests must pay $7 just to see the place, one of the main tourist attractions on Montenegro's 175 miles of coast.

Then came a few unsettling omens. To pay the travel agency, I had to wire funds to the agency's bank from mine, because credit-card transactions aren't yet secure in Montenegro. And right before I left, I read that a crony of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, indicted on war-crimes charges, had just been arrested in Budva, near Sveti Stefan.

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