To really appreciate Mostar today one
must study a bit the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. One of the most concise accounts is Understanding
Yugoslavia by Cameron Hewitt one Rick Steves guides. It runs about 12 pages but it's heavily
weighted on the 90's breakup. I
encourage you to read it. A good
satirical look is the film No Man's Land by Bosnian writer and director DanisTanovic. The film won the Oscar for Best
Foreign Language Film in 2001. It does a
great job with the absurdity of the conflict, the ineffectiveness of the UN
peacekeepers, and the shallowness of the press.
To go for extra credit read The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking
Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda by Elizabeth Neuffer. She does as well as anyone could putting
together the story of the genocide at Srebrenica. Personally I had to skip the chapters on
Rwanda. It was all I could do to get
through Bosnia. An interesting exercise
is to look at Srebrenica
on Google earth to understand what a difficult position people were in. The town is in a very narrow valley. Next look at the The
Srebrenica - Potocari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995
Genocide or Google it then click on images.
OK enough, the rest of the post focuses on Mostar and the Stari Most.
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Due to the inaccessibility of the cemeteries
during the Bosnia war, public parks were converted to graveyards.
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Mostar, situated on the Neretva River
was named after the bridge keepers (mostari) who in the medieval times guarded
the Stari Most (Old Bridge) over the Neretva. The Old Bridge, considered one of the most
exemplary pieces of Islamic architecture in the Balkans, was built by the
Ottomans in the 16th century and has become one of Bosnia-Herzegovina's most
recognizable landmarks. Human
settlements on the river Neretva, between the Hum Hill and the Velež Mountain,
have existed since prehistory, as witnessed by discoveries of fortifications
and cemeteries. Evidence of Roman occupation
was discovered beneath the present town.
In 1468 Mostar came under Ottoman rule and the urbanization of the
settlement began.
The stone bridge
(Stari Most), designed by Mimar Hayruddin, a student and apprentice of the
famous Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, was erected in 1566 on the orders of
Suleiman the Magnificent. At 28 meters
long and 20 meters high, It quickly became a wonder in its own time. In the
17th century a famous traveler, Evliya Çelebi, wrote that: the bridge is like a
rainbow arch soaring up to the skies, extending from one cliff to the other.
...I, a poor and miserable slave of Allah, have passed through 16 countries,
but I have never seen such a high bridge. It is thrown from rock to rock as high as the
sky. The Old Bridge stood for 427 years,
until it was destroyed on 9 November 1993 during the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Sarajevo newspapers reported that more than 60 shells hit the bridge before it
collapsed. A spokesman for the Croats admitted that they deliberately destroyed
it, claiming that it was of strategic importance. Others argue that the bridge held little
strategic value and that shelling it was an act of "killing memory",
in which evidence of a shared cultural heritage and peaceful co-existence were
deliberately destroyed.
After the end of
the war UNESCO established an international committee of experts to oversee the
design and reconstruction work of a bridge as similar as possible to the
original, using the same technology and materials. The reconstructed bridge was inaugurated on
23 July 2004. It is traditional for
young men to leap from the bridge into the Neretva. The practice dates back to the time the bridge
was built, with the first recorded instance in 1664.
