September 13, 2010
Mostar, Bosnia & Hercegovina
I tried to talk myself into being very pleased with Mostar, but it didn’t take. I guess I had seen photos of the Old Bridge (stari most) which show an apparently lovely city with a beautiful river, and I expected all of the town to be like that. It wasn’t.
The burbs are pretty nice, with nice areas of houses scattered on the hills that surround the city.
The heart to the old town is around the bridge which was built some 600 years ago and is an engineering as well as an architectural marvel. It was strong enough in the 1940’s for German tanks to roll over it. It was shelled and destroyed in 1993 and rebuilt with EU/UNESCO funds a decade later. It divides the Orthodox population on one side and the Muslim population on the other (the Jews having long since left).
Everything about the former Yugoslavia must be viewed keeping in mind that this is the crossroads of East and West, where communism meets captalism (or at least the social democrat variety), and, most importantly, where Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, and Islam collide. Bosnia-Hercegovina is made up of three regions: Muslim Bosnia, Catholic Hercegovia, and Orthodox Republika Srbska.
The city was devastated during the war. Empty shells of buildings are still all over and bullet holes riddle buildings. The old town (stari grad) surrounds the stari most, and it really pretty cool. No walls, but narrow cobbled footpaths with vendors selling various goods and souvenirs. Even on the Orthodox side of the bridge the goods had a decidedly Asia flavor, probably because that stuff appears more exotic to the Western eye and thus sells better. It is sort of a bazaar, and fun to walk around, but after about an hour you think “Okay, that’s nice. What else?”
My tour didn’t include anything other than the old town so getting to any outlying sites was not possible. Thus I walked out of the stari most and did a large circle around it, seeing how average people lived in the downtown area. That was where you stared to feel a little less safe. It’s hard to tell what the city looked like before the war. Any city that old is bound to have a lot of decrepit old buildings, and communism does not lend itself to creating beautiful cities.
