MOSTAR BRIDGE

Bosnia
We were both slightly uneasy about going to Bosnia, it having had such a harrowing recent past. Our unease was added to by the doleful appearance of the first piece of Bosnian territory we encountered, a 15-km tongue of land touching the Adriatic and separating Dubrovnik from the rest of Croatia, which Dubrovnik had centuries ago given to Turkey to insulate itself from land invasion by Venice. Trashy non-architecture thrown together by developers willy-nilly above the cliff-tops because they could. Costa del Sol without the class. Secondly, there was a queue at the eventual Bosnian frontier – the first we had met – and on reaching the front of it, I found that my motor insurance didn’t cover us for Bosnia. Thirdly, it had started to rain, the first we had seen since leaving Slovenia. Not a good start.
Not all bad news, though, as the Green Card cost a not unreasonable €20. It looked even better value when we saw the standard of Bosnian driving.
We had decided to stay overnight at Mostar, home of the famous bridge built by the Turks in 1566 and smashed by the Croats in 1992. We had no details of any campsites in Bosnia and halted at the railway station to seek information. What a place! It was boarded up and evidently not somewhere that trains were tempted to visit. There was a lot of dubious people hanging about and the rubbish-strewn wasteland where we parked had a number of broken-down vehicles scattered around it, one inhabited by an old lady younger than Ruth and I. I took off my expensive watch, advised Ruth to lock herself in the van and tried to find information. Nothing. We found a “pansion” with parking for the van and slept that night in a real bed.
Mostar really had the shit kicked out of it in the war. The bridge re-opened four years ago but there are many wrecked buildings around the town with notices warning of dangerous structures. Almost all of those that aren’t wrecked have shell holes in them or have been abandoned by their occupants along with the city and their former neighbours. The internationally-known architectural “stars” of the city have been restored with the aid of international organisations and funders but the basic fabric languishes for a lack of cash which the Bosnian government hasn’t got.
We drove up from Mostar to Sarajevo alongside the Neretva in the rain. Grey sky, grey rock, grey river. Landslips. But the really weird thing is that the countryside is alpine, which means that the villages are full of “Swiss” chalets but with minarets standing out amongst them.
I can’t help feeling that we short changed Bosnia. We had to leave because we had arranged to be in Budapest by a certain date and only spent two nights in Sarajevo. It rained the whole time but we travelled into town on the rattly old trams which still trundle around, preserved by the God of Ancient Transportation from the ravages of age and war. We saw the spot where the odious Archduke and his Archduchess were shot and by Heaven knows what fall of dominoes started the First World War. We also visited a comfortable and homely synagogue but what struck me was the orientality of the bazaar quarter which for centuries had been a trading and administrative centre of the Ottoman Empire on the doorstep of central Europe. And although it has been a magnet for tourists in the past, on our visit and in the rain there weren’t that many tourists to be seen, but the feeling I got was, tourism or no, it had been important for the Sarajevans to put everything back as it had been before being almost destroyed by Serbian artillery, as a mark of their own Bosnian identity.
On our drive up through Bosnia we noted the generally deserted and run-down appearance of the country, much war damage not having been repaired and many of the former inhabitants having given up and left their homes. A few miles short of the Croatian border, we came across a surrealistic scene. In the middle of an enormous minefield in the forest (announced by skull-and-crossboned, exclamation and rust-marked signs on both sides of the road) was a vast open-air bazaar of several acres consisting of hundreds of enclosed market stalls, most apparently open for business, but with no customers. “In the middle of nowhere” would have been a poor description, but promoting a retail park “in the middle of a minefield in the middle of nowhere” could be an interesting project to set a Chartered Practitioner in Advertising.
It’s true that the Bosnians haven’t got a lot to celebrate at the moment but they aren’t as miserable as the Croats. Good luck to them.