Shamballa Cruising Yacht Club: Mostar, Bosnia

Mostar is a very old and beautiful city with a sad and troubled past. Today it is packed with tourists and the entire old quarter of stone buildings and cobblestoned streets has given way to restaurants and souvenir shops. The main tourist attraction is the old bridge, Stari Most. This bridge was built in the mid 1500’s by Suleiman the Magnificent. At the time of its completion, the bridge was the largest man-made arch in the world. It held pride of place for the town (in fact ‘Mostar’ means bridge keeper) for 427 years until it was destroyed 1993 during the Balkan War.

Stari Most

The bridge from the river

The fast flowing Neretva River

Croatian forces bombarded the bridge with 64 direct hits before it fell. This bridge was the last bridge that connected the eastern and western banks of the Neretva River which flows through the middle of Mostar. After the war the bridge was rebuilt by an international team committed to restoring Stari Most to its 16^th Century beauty. The rebuilt bridge was opened in 2004. A museum about the bridge tells the sad and proud story.

The bridge a hundred years ago

The bridge after the War

Today, with the symbol of the town restored, Mostar is thriving with tourist but the scars of the war are still there. We passed by many buildings where bullet holes peppered the stucco and graffiti remembers those who died.

Bullet holes in buildings

While in Mostar we read what we could about the Balkan War. I must admit that in the 1900’s we were busy raising three small children and this European war was just an item on the news for us. Our research has not made the origins and reasons for the war much clearer other than it was yet another example of man’s inhumanity to man fuelled by religion. First, in 1992, the Croats (Catholic) and Bosniaks (Muslims) joined forces against the Yugoslavian Serbs (Orthodox). Then, in1993, the alliance between Croats and Bosniaks broke down and they started fighting each other. It seems that Tito, the dictator of Yugoslavia, was able to keep the lid on the festering cauldron of centuries of tribalism and hatred in the area but after his death the simmering pot exploded. Over 2000 people died in Mostar alone.

An excellent War Photography exhibit is housed in one of the towers of the bridge. This is the work of a New Zealand photojournalist, Wade Goddard, who came to the Balkans in the 1990’s as a novice journalist and stayed to record what he saw. The exhibit was very moving. Some of Wade Goddard’s photographs can be seen here.

Yet Mostar was an example of ethnic harmony. Prior to the war, one third of the families were mixed ethnically. When we talked with one of the locals about the war he maintained that the political powers couldn’t have that harmony and stirred up ethnic unrest in the old ‘divide and conquer’ gambit. Our host at the hotel also told us of her experience. She said that when the conflict started everyone thought it would last just a short time and all would be sorted but the killing continued for 4 years. Again the old refrain of ‘home by Christmas’. Both these locals also expressed ambivalence towards the tourists who seem to come to take photos of the bridge and not understand the history of the town. We certainly noticed the contrast of the empty the museums with thongs on the streets buying souvenirs.

Tourist in the streets

Nevertheless we too were one of the visitors to the town and could be perceived the same way. We certainly took many snaps of the beautiful iconic bridge. We also went to the Hamam Museum which was one of the best we have seen and the Muslibegović House, a museum of a 19^th Century residential building showing Turkish style rooms and displaying some interesting manuscripts from the 1700’s.

Beautifully restored Hamam

Silver soap dishes - a bit nicer than my blue plastic one!

Turkish style rooms

One of the big tourist attractions is for men to dive off the top of the bridge. There is a traditional annual competition of diving off Stari Most held the end of July. This has been going on for over 400 years. The bridge is very high and the water of the Neretva River very cold. Outside of the competition the practice today is for young men to stand on the edge of the bridge collecting money for the dive. When 25 euros is collected then the men will dive. We watched this going on and sadly it seems the money is collected but men are just possers in the budgie smugglers and rarely dive. We met an old man in a shop who showed us pictures of when he dived in the 1960’s. He very proudly said he did it for the tradition and no money was exchanged.