Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Ready to move on, I climbed into my little car, left Nevesinje, and drove out of the
mountains. My destination was a city that once symbolized East and West coming togeth-
er peacefully, then symbolized just the opposite, and today seems to be enjoying a tentat-
ive new spirit of peaceful coexistence: Mostar.
Exploring the city of Mostar—with its vibrant humanity and the persistent reminders of its
recent and terrible war—was both exhilarating and exhausting.
Mostar represents the best and the worst of Yugoslavia. During the Tito years, it was
an idyllic mingling of cultures—Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslim Bosniaks
living together in relative harmony, their differences spanned by an Old Bridge that sym-
bolized an optimistic vision of a Yugoslavia where ethnicity didn't matter. And yet, as
the country unraveled in the early 1990s, Mostar was gripped by a gory three-way war
among those same groups. Not that long ago, the people I now encountered here—those
who brought me a coffee at a café, stopped for me when I jaywalked, showed off their
paintings, and directed the church choir—had been killing each other.
Mostar's 400-year-old, Turkish-style stone bridge—with its elegant, single, pointed
arch—was symbolic of the town's status as the place where East met West in Europe.
Then, during the 1990s, Mostar became the tragic poster child of the Bosnian war. Across
the world, people felt the town's pain when its beloved bridge—bombarded for days from
the hilltop above—finally collapsed into the river.
