This article appeared in the March 1998 issue of the journal Transitions, published by the Open Media Research Institute (Prague). For information on how to subscribe to Transitions, see OMRI's Web page at http://www.omri.cz/publications/transition/Index.html

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Transitions

vol. 5 no. 3 (March, 1998)

By Andrew Herscher

The Old City of Mostar straddles a lush gorge, through which the Neretva River flows, its banks a mix of sandy beaches and rock ledges. But the graceful 16th-century stone bridge that gave Mostar its name no longer traverses the Neretva and no longer connects the two sides of the Old City. Simple Ottoman-era buildings still line the narrow streets, with their artisans' workshops and cafes, but many are damaged or ruined. The Old City still holds 19th-century Orthodox and Catholic churches, Austro-Hungarian municipal buildings and even a few examples of inter-war functionalist architecture. Many of these, too, are damaged or ruined.

What happened in Mostar was only an extreme example of what happened throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war. One of the distinguishing features of the conflict was the role played by cultural patrimony and especially by architecture. Rather than simply an adjunct to the territory that armies were attempting to gain control of in Bosnia, architecture was understood by those prosecuting the war as a clear sign of historical ownership of those territories. Thus, Bosnian Serbs and Croats attempted not only to conquer territory by vanquishing the Bosnian Muslim army that defended it, but also to legitimize their conquests by eliminating the evidence that called their claims into question: indigenous Muslim communities and the architectural environments they inhabited. Neologisms were coined during the war to describe this assault on cultural monuments, such as "warchitecture," the deliberate destruction of architecture, and "urbicide," the deliberate destruction of cities. These terms defined what is essentially a counterpart to ethnic cleansing: the destruction of the architectural and urban settings of an ethnic group under assault.

A Bosnian Ministry of Culture report on the protection of cultural heritage states that "issues of survival, health care, and education have to be taken care of before the issue of cultural heritage." Since the war, architecture has generally been dealt with less in terms of its cultural significance than in terms of its more specific functional capacities. Only last September, for example, after shelter and access to basic amenities had been provided to Mostar's population, did engineers begin to raise pieces of Mostar's destroyed Old Bridge from the Neretva River, the first step in the bridge's much-anticipated reconstruction.

The rebuilding off a destroyed monument like the Old Bridge might appear to be a relatively straightforward task, one whose execution depends chiefly on technology and funding. The seeming simplicity of rebuilding destroyed architecture belies the difficulties of reconstructing a city after a war, especially when the war radically transforms that city's culture. As recent events in Mostar show, the difficulty of architecturally rebuilding a city is dwarfed by the difficulty of rebuilding the society that a city shelters and the culture that a city fosters. Indeed, Mostar's already ongoing reconstruction raises a question that will eventually have to be asked throughout Bosnia: what does it mean to reconstruct a damaged city in the absence of some or all of the people who inhabited, used, and identified with that city?

A report pulflished in 1995 by the Institute for the Protection of Cultural, Historical, and Natural Heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina documents the damage and destruction to more than 2,000 culturally significant works of architecture during the war: 1,115 mosques, 309 Catholic churches, 36 Serbian Orthodox churches, and 1,079 other public buildings.

The difficulties encountered during rebuilding are symbolized by the difficulties encumbering the Institute for the Protection of Cultural, Historical and Natural Heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Its work is now severely constrained; its mandate has been shifted to the cantonal level. Also, because of the war, Bosnia has not been able to develop institutional mandates to accord with restitution of publicly-owned buildings in socialist Yugoslavia to their former private owners. While restitution has only occurred on a limited scale in Bosnia, the restituted property, such as that of religious institutions, includes many of the country's most significant monuments. As the institute previously dealt with public property and has not developed a new procedural mandate, it no longer has authority over the rebuilding of such monuments, or other restituted buildings.

Additionally, the institute's prewar work concentrated on the protection and preservation of historical monuments, rather than on their reconstruction. In the post-war context it is the latter problem that is by far the most pressing, and it is a problem that presents the institute with a lot of previously unexplored issues. The institute's headquarters in Sarajevo was shelled and taken over by Serbian soldiers in April 1992. Now housed on half of the third floor of an apartment building, lacking adequate technical equipment and having lost a large part of its archives, the institute is in no position to actively intervene in Bosnia's rebuilding.

The institute's director, Muhamed Hamidovic, has estimated that 50 historically significant buildings were destroved in Bosnia even after the signing of the Dayton agreement, testimony to the free-for-all that characterizes rebuilding in much of postwar Bosnia.

The Dayton agreement has attempted to compensate for the lack of a national institute of historic preservation in Bosnia by setting up a Commission to Preserve National Monuments. The group has five members: a Serb, a Croat, a Muslim, and two representatives of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It is charged with designating property having "cultural, historic, religious or ethnic importance as national monuments." The area -- whether it be Serbian, Croatian, or Muslim -- where a designated monument is located must take appropriate measures to protect it and "refrain from taking any deliberate measures that might damage" it.

A situation in which a government must be prevented from deliberately damaging monunments and prodded to take active steps to preserve them is perilous: the forces that necessitate the promotion of the first objective would seem to provide massive disincentives for acceding to the second. Not surprisingly the Commission to Preserve National Monuments, like most if not all of the putatively "national" institutions set up by the Dayton agreement, lacks both a constituency and a will to fulfill its mandate. Moreover, that mandate is defined only in the most general terms. Hindered operationally -- the Serbian representative has been changed three times -- the commission has met six times and has succeeded in designating only about a dozen properties as "national monuments."

Projects to rebuild historic works of architecture and urban areas always face a dilemma: should the project return the building or city as much as possible to the way it looked and perhaps even functioned in the past -- the goal of reconstruction -- or should it use the necessity of rebuilding as an opportunity to solve other problems, and in the process transform the object under consideration -- the goal of renovation? The situation is still more complicated in postwar rebuilding, especially after wars that cause massive changes in population. A city and the buildings it contains are instruments of and monuments to the political, social, and cultural life of a coiumunity. When this continuity changes, so do the meanings of the buildings they formerly inhabited. Postwar rebuilding, then, cannot simply rely on the pre-existing cultural value of a monument but has to recalibrate the relationship between that monument and its new public.

Mostar provides a dramatic example of a Bosnian city transformed architecturally and socially by war. Before the war, Muslims and Croats were aImost equal in population in Mostar, and the city. also had a Serbian minority of almost 20 percent. During the 1993-94 Croat-Muslim "war within a war," however, Mostar was split; East Mostar, the site of the Old City on the Neretva River, became Muslim territory; while West Mostar, largely developed after World War II, became Croatian. The population of both parts of the city changed radically, as people were expelled from one side to the other, fled the city, or took refuge in Mostar from outlyig towns and villages. A census taken in East Mostar after the war recorded a population of half the prewar level; aImost 40 percent of the people were refugees, and aImost 25 percent were displaced persons. Thus, ethnic cleansing in Mostar produced not only ethnically homogenous populations, but also ones drawvn from scattered geographical areas, so that the affiliating element of these populations is no longer a shared relationship to a particular place but solely a relationship to a particular ethnic group. For this reason, the architectural heritage of cities like Mostar tends to be no longer perceived as the patrimony of the city's entire population but rather that of a single ethnic group; Mostar's Old Town, lying completely in the eastern section of the city, can signify both Mostar's multicultural past and its monocultural present.

Because the fate of Mostar was one of the key points of contention between Croats and Muslims in peace negotiations, the European Union took over the city's administration for two years in 1994. The aim was to overcome Mostar's ethnic division through the process of reconstruction, a feat that was to provide a much-needed model of cooperation for the Croat-Muslim Federation. In the two years of its administration of Mostar, the EU spent about 150 million dollars winterizing damaged residences and rebuilding damaged schools, medical facilities, courthouses, government offices, hotels, a theater, and railway and bus stations. The EU also funded the reconstruction of Mostar's infrastructure, rebuilding water and electricity lines, repairing streets, and restoring bridge connections over the Neretva River. Most of this work was concentrated in East Mostar, which was far more damaged in the war than West Mostar. The EU hoped that equalizing conditions in the city's two hailves would foster reconciliation; its success in reconstructing Mostar's ruined buildings and infrastructure, however, took place against its inability to reconstruct Mostar's ruined political, social, and cultural institutions.

Mostar's persisting division affects every important architectural project within the city including, most significantly, the rebuilding of the Old City. Plans for the rebuilding of the Old City are framed by the East's isolation firom the West.The problem so criticized in contemporary urban conservation theory -- the isolation of a citiy's historic core from its larger urban context -- in today's Mostar occurs for strictly political reasons. The two institutions that have taken responsibility for the Old City's rebuilding are the regional office of the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Historical, and Natural Heritage in Mostar (the municipality owns about 75 percent of the Old City) and UNESCO.

In general, renovation and not reconstruction has been the choice for dealing with war-damaged buildings in Mostar. For example, Mostar's mosques, specifically targeted for destruction during the war, have been renovated with funds provided both by the EU and by Saudi Arabia. Some of these renovations have displayed a decided lack of interest in reusing serviceable parts of damaged buildings. One of the mandates UNESCO has assumed in Mostar is to compel reconstruction, rather than renovation, whenever possible. This mandate is clearly visible in the differences between the two urban plans that have been proposed for the rebuilding of Mostar's Old City, one prepared with the Institute's cooperation and one sponsored by UNESCO.

The first plan, entitled Mostar 2004, was initiated by Amir Pasic, former director of the Old City's architectural preservation office. Its primary sponsors are various Turkish institutions. The plan was developed through three summer workshops, in Istanbul in 1995 and 1996, and in Mostar in 1997. In these workshops, international groups of architecture students worked with Bosnian and foreign architects to develop projects for Mostar's postwar rebuilding. In keeping with Pasic's notion that the new master plan should analyze and correct the city's rebuilding "mistakes," the Mostar 2004 projects have tended to propose a kind of municipal renovation. For example, numerous projects dealt with planning problems that faced the Old Citiy even before the war, such as improving access from the Old City to the river or developing the riverside, rather than specificalIy reconstructing damaged buildings.

The UNESCO plan for the Old City was drawn up between March and July 1997 under the supervision of Italian architect Carlo Blassi. While the Mostar 2004 plan is oriented as much toward renovation as reconstruction, the UNESCO plan is specifically intended as "an instrument of reference ... indicating the most urgent interventions for safeguarding and revitalizing the Old City." The basis of the plan is an exacting survey of the Old City. in which each building is classified according to its historical period, architectural value, morphology, function, and existing condition. The plan aims to focus reconstruction work on buildings in greatest need of repair or projects with the most potential to revitalize the Old City as a whole.

Both the Mostar 2004 and UNESCO plans acknowledge that the Old City's rebuilding should suture the city together by re-emphasizing the city's multicultural heritage; the Old City's combination of Turkish and Austro-Hungarian architecture should serve as a symbol of this heritage and an inspiration for a renewed sense of multiculturalism in Mostar's divided population. What neither plan explicitly acknowledges, however, is that the Old City will assume symbolic meaning not only according to the lineage of its architecture, but also according to the politics of its rebuilding; if this rebuilding proceeds in the framework of a divided city, without the involvement of citizens from both sides of the city, then the Old City can only convey the iniage that was imposed on it during the war.

Without architects' input, Bosnian cities and towns could be shaped primarily by the interests of governments that use architecture to colonize territory, powerful individuals who use architecture to extract profit, and international organizations that use architecture to satisfy the basic material demands of people in need. In postwar Bosnia, it is easy to point to cases of just such interests sponsoring rebuilding projects. In western Herzegovina, for example, new housing is being built for the present Croat population beside the abandoned buildings of formerly Muslim-majority towns and villages. Elsewhere in Bosnia, municipalities and individuals are initiating projects that take advantage of soft loans and grants, rather than projects with long-term social and cultural benefits. International organizations have financed the greatly needed rebuilding of some damaged towns and villages, but in certain cases, this rebuilding has completely ignored a strongly defined prewar form of building or urbanism.

This is not to suggest that a narrowly defined preservationism should be the most important criterion for reconstruction in Bosnia. This criterion would surely prevent crucial work from proceeding. Projects should respond to a site's historic cultural dimensions as well as its current ones. The practice of reconstruction, in other words, cannot be separated from the object of reconstruction; if reconstruction projects are not conceived and carried out in culturally diverse contexts, these projects can only go so far in expressing cultural diversity. Hard questions, of course, are posed by damaged or destroyed artifacts in Bosnia that no longer have a community to care for them. In a city like Mostar, however, a somewhat diverse community still exists, albeit in extreme separation. The rebuilding of Mostar can respond to this separation, as well as to the damage done to architecture, only if both parts of the city's divided community can be involved in the rebuilding process.

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Andrew Herscher has worked as an architect in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia, and has written on early modern and contemporary architecture in Eastern Europe. He has been involved in the development of Mostar's Old Town through work in the city's historic preservation office and in the Mostar 2004 project.

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