Old Bridge of Mostar rises from the ruins of war to bring once-bitter
enemies together

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade and Marcus Tanner

To most visitors, Mostar's Stari Most, or Old Bridge, was a symbol of
all they most cherished and admired about the old Yugoslavia and Bosnia.
Arching over the rushing torrent of the Neretva river, this graceful and
delicate-looking structure had withstood the vicissitudes of 437 years,
outliving the changing regimes of the Ottomans, Austrians, royalist
Yugoslavs and Communists. It seemed a symbol of Bosnia's durability.
Its very nature, as a bridge, symbolised to many what Bosnia is, a
meeting place of several cultures and religions.

Its destruction 10 years ago was equally symbolic of the tearing-up of
old ties in Yugoslavia, as Serbs, Croats and Muslims hurled themselves
into a brutal war. But the Serbs, though the main culprits in Bosnia's
overall tragedy, were not the immediate cause of this particular
tragedy.

Instead, the Stari Most fell victim to the struggle between Croats and
Muslims, battling for control of Mostar, regional capital of Herzegovina.
A Croatian General, Slobodan Praljak, ordered his men to shell it. He had
no time for tradition or nostalgia, saying he was not sorry, because
it was "just an old bridge", and its destruction would keep Croats and
Muslims apart. On 1 November, 1993, the Old Bridge finally tumbled into
the icy Neretva. A monument once listed as a Unesco world heritage site
remained only on photographs and in the memories of the people of Mostar,
as well as in the minds of architects and former tourists.

But now the Old Bridge is beginning a new life. The two sides of an
elegant stone replica are only a few feet apart, awaiting the placing
of the final stone next week. When that moment comes, the 29 metre-wide
bridge, its arch rising 20 metres above the Neretva, will look much the
same as it did.

The reconstruction of the bridge and other monuments in Mostar has
cost £10m. Work started two years ago, mainly financed by the World Bank
and the Aga Khan Foundation as well as by Italy, France, the Netherlands
and Turkey.

A Turkish firm won the contract for rebuilding the bridge. The Turks
may have proposed the best plan, but there was a neat symbolism about
this, bearing in mind that a Turkish architect, Mimar Hayruddin, looked
at the Neretva almost 500 years ago and built in his mind a beautiful
white stone bridge to connect its banks.

It was a masterpiece of its time, reputedly constructed using mortar
made from horse-hair and egg-whites. Legend says that to be on the
safe side, Hayruddin went to the nearby Radobolja river and constructed
a small bridge with an elegant arch. It was finished in 1558 and was
an almost perfect prototype of the Mostar bridge. The experience and
knowledge gained from this were used by Hayruddin and his masons when
they started building the bridge in Mostar in 1557. It took nine years,
using 456 blocks of stone from the Mukosa quarry nearby.

Nearly half a millennium later, another group of Turkish masons
went back to the same quarry to find suitable stones with which to
reconstruct the new Old Bridge. Hayruddin had left no plans, so the
work of rebuilding has forced the modern designers to study what is
known of the ancient methods.

In 1997, two years after the war in Bosnia ended, Hungarian military
divers completed the dangerous operation of removing hundreds of the
stone blocks from the collapsed bridge from the river. They were neatly
collected and classified for future reconstruction. In the meantime,
the authorities of the divided town put up a suspension bridge.

Mostar once boasted a large community of artists and intellectuals.
Most of them mourned the passing of a monument that was more than a
symbol of the town, or of Bosnia. The town owed its very name, Mostar,
to the word most, or bridge. "Looking at what was left of the bridge
was like looking at an invalid," Salko Pezo, a Mostar painter, said.
The construction chief, Rusmir Cisic, said: "We don't want the bridge
simply to connect the two sides of the river. We want to connect people
in Mostar, one of the most devastated cities in Bosnia-Herzegovina."

But reuniting the people may prove far harder than simply rebuilding
the bridge. In many ways, the bridge had collapsed between the two
largest communities in Mostar long before Croat shells sent the stone
blocks crashing into the river.

Of pre-war Mostar's population of 126,000, about 34 per cent were
Croats, 35 per cent were Muslims, and the rest were Serbs, or from
mixed marriages. After the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army withdrew
from the area in the early stages of war, the Croats and Muslims,
initially allies against the Serbs, turned savagely on each other.

The Croats in particular began to resent the Old Bridge. It became
an emblem of a unity they no longer wished to uphold, and as an
Ottoman monument, it was increasingly seen as a purely Muslim symbol.
With the Old Bridge gone, they could formalise the hoped-for business
of separating Herzegovina into self-governing Croat, Muslim and Serb
sections.

The right bank of the Neretva, the Croat part, was almost untouched
by warfare. The left bank, the older but smaller part, was for Muslims.
But even with a reopened bridge, Mostar is unlikely to return to the
care-free days of the 1980s when children of all nationalities dived off
the Stari Most into the Neretva to the applause of locals and tourists.
The memories of atrocities are too strong.

Marcus Tanner is author of 'Croatia: A Nation Forged in War', Yale
University Press