The Old Bridge

Before returning to Bulgaria, Anne and Mark made one final day trip.  This trip was to the city of Mostar, which is located in the nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Like Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina was also a part of the nation of Yugoslavia prior to its break up in the 1990s.  Unfortunately, Bosnia and Herzegovina was the location of a severe civil war after the break-up of Yugoslavia.  In many places, the remnants of the destruction caused by this war are still readily visible.

As with their trip to Split, Anne and Mark had to make multiple border crossings in each directions for their visit to Mostar.  They headed northwest from Dubrovnik along the coast.  Then they crossed into Bosnia and Herzegovina for a short stretch, and then crossed back into Croatia again.  Then, they turned north/ northeast on E73 toward Mostar and had to cross the border into Bosnia.  Why take this route?  Why enter Bosnia, leave it, and then enter it again?  According to the guide, the reason to take this route is that there is no highway leading to Mostar from that small stretch of Bosnia.  Even the people who live there have to cross into Croatia and then back into Bosnia if they want to reach Mostar.

Eagle-eyed map readers with a Catholic upbringing may recognize a city on this map called Medugorje.  Medugorje is a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina that was put on the theological map in the early 1980s (back then, this was all still Yugoslavia) when a handful of Catholics living there claimed to have witnessed the Virgin Mary appear to them.  The Catholic Church has never officially recognized Medugorje as a miracle, a legitimate sighting or even as a holy site of any kind, but the pope did find it at least intriguing enough to set up a commission to investigate it in 2010.  Anne and Mark's tour did not stop in Medjugorje so they did not see it, but they did encounter many people on pilgrimages to the site at every place they did stop.

Artist colonies often have aesthetically pleasing flora.

Speaking of places they did stop, the first place Anne and Mark stopped in Bosnia and Herzegovina was an old fort that has been re-made into an artist's colony.  Apparently turning swords into plowshares wasn't quite right for the people who took over the fort when it was abandoned after the war.  They went further and turned their swords into paintbrushes, and have been living there ever since performing their art and making or finding what they need to survive.  

And these people were surviving pretty well.  This is not a surprise, as they must have had tremendous cardio-vascular conditioning.  The occupied portions of the place were spread along the steep side of a cliff, so it might be 100 steps to your neighbor's house just to borrow a cup of sugar.  Dealing with that every day, these people were probably in shape.  Secondly, they were artist and farmer types who made sales to the tourist types who were passing through.  This is not a bad way to survive.  On the way in, Anne and Mark bought some dates and figs, which were fantastic.  On the way out, Anne got roped into buying a bottle of pomegranate juice, so they extracted a few Euros.  Assuming this is par for the course, they probably make a decent enough living just off of the tourists passing by.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, the pomegranate is the Ft. Knox of fruit.  Nearly inaccessible.  It tastes pretty good, but the amount of work necessary to get the little individual bits of fruity goodness out of the husk and ready to eat is tremendous.  Way more work than a banana.  So even though a consumer may prefer the taste of pomegranates over the taste of bananas (the second most inaccessible fruit), if given a choice, the consumer will take the banana every time because the work to access the pomegranate goodness more than offsets the difference in taste preference.

So pomegranate juice is a good idea, right?  Someone else did all the work and Anne just buys the concentrated fruit goodness?  Right?  Kind of.  The key word in that sentence is "concentrated."  It was not like juices that we are used to drinking, it was more like syrup.  Way too concentrated to drink out of the bottle.  Of course, as people who drink pomegranate juice once every.... well, never, Anne and Mark had no idea that this would be so strong.  Mark took one swig and spent the rest of the afternoon wondering if he would be able to communicate the word "insulin" to a Slavic speaker through pantomime if it became necessary.

After getting a significant sugar buzz from the pomegranate juice experience, Anne and Mark made the last leg of the trip to Mostar.

As mentioned, Mostar was the site of significant fighting during the war in the 1990s.  Whereas most of the damage in Dubrovnik has been repaired, much more of the damage in Mostar is still visible.

Mostar has a long history featuring residents of vastly different ethnicities, religions and races.  The city has long been home to significant numbers of Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims.  When war came to Mostar in the 1990s, these divisions in particular were thrust into the forefront and the city was divided, literally and figuratively.

One of the most famous features of Mostar is the Stari Most ("Old Bridge").  It was built by the ruling Ottomans in the 16th century.  In addition to being an engineering marvel ahead of its time, it became a not-so-subtle symbol of different cultures "bridging" gaps and living together peacefully.  In the war in the 1990s, the bridge was bombed many times over several months.  Eventually, it was destroyed.  Our guide opined that this was not a terribly important tactical achievement in the war, but was significant symbolically as it prevented the Muslims (on one side of the river) from reaching the Christians (on the other).

After the war was over, the people of Mostar wanted to rebuild the bridge with its original materials.  Unfortunately, some blocks of stone had sat in the river below for so long, they had become unstable and not suitable building materials.  So, as an alternative, the city rebuilt the bridge using stone from the same location as the original and using the same methods that were used in the 16th century.  It took even longer to build the bridge the second time (apparently, those guys in the 16th century were much better at certain bridge-building techniques than modern workers), but they got it done.  Now the "New Old Bridge" stands in the place where the Old Bridge used to stand, uniting the parts of the city.

That's a good looking guy in the baby blue polo shirt standing on that bridge.