ATRC is applying the Chronity Index to a zone in Dobrota, on the Bay of Kotor. This page describes the method, where the pilot stands today, and what follows.
Architectura Temporis Research Centre (ATRC) is a non-governmental research organisation registered in Herceg Novi, Montenegro. We study how time accumulates in historic buildings and develop instruments to measure it.
The towns of the Bay of Kotor still carry the marks of Venetian, Ottoman and Austrian rule. Time keeps working on that stone every day, through weathering, repair and reuse. Heritage practice usually records this in expert prose. Our aim is a reading that a second team, working independently, can reproduce.
The Chronity Index (CI) expresses a building's accumulated temporal quality as a single score. It combines three measured components: how the fabric is perceived on site, how much authentic material survives, and how intact the whole remains. A separate multiplier reflects the level of legal protection (local, national or UNESCO). Scores for individual buildings aggregate into a reading for the whole zone.
A companion protocol, Temporal Impact Assessment (TIA), uses the same measurements to estimate how a proposed intervention would change a building's score, and its zone's, before the intervention is approved.
Dobrota lies on the inner Bay of Kotor, within the UNESCO World Heritage property “Natural and Culturo-Historical Region of Kotor”, inscribed in 1979. The settlement grew as a chain of family clusters along the shore, each around its own parish church, with baroque captains' houses as their landmarks.
The Municipality of Kotor has formally approved the pilot and selected its location. The approval was put into effect on 18 September 2026, when the municipal Secretariat for Urban Planning, Housing and Spatial Development supplied the documentation for the study area: the cadastral base, extracts from the spatial plans (PUP/GUR) and drone imagery.
Georeferencing: the cadastral drawing was aligned to WGS84 with an empirical shift fitted on 392 buildings matched against OpenStreetMap (median residual 2 m, 90th percentile 5 m). This is a working correction and will be replaced once official transformation parameters are available.
Fieldwork runs through October and November 2026. Field teams are formed from students of the Faculty of Architecture, University of Montenegro, as part of a study practicum. They work from a field protocol guide issued in Montenegrin, English and Russian. Each building is measured by three researchers independently, with no reconciliation on site, and the recorded value is the mean of the three.
The results feed a zonal Chrono-Passport: an individual passport for every object, plus the aggregated zone reading and its map. It fixes a dated baseline against which later change in the zone can be measured.
Two neighbouring zones in Dobrota are already defined: DO·001 to the south and DO·003, reserved, to the north. Beyond Dobrota, the goal is a network of measured zones around the Bay of Kotor and a published protocol that other historic sites in the Western Balkans can adopt.
The Chronity Index methodology is documented in a series of technical appendices and a field guide, with journal and conference publications in progress. The pilot follows these principles:
We would like to hear from research institutions, heritage bodies and funders interested in testing the method at another site or following the Kotor pilot.