Old Stone Bridge (Stari Most)

The bridge was built in 1682–1683, late in the Ottoman period, at the strategic Neretva crossing that had fixed Konjic on the route between the interior and the Herzegovinian lowlands. It was a six-arch stone bridge of dressed limestone, a refined example of Ottoman bridge-building comparable in quality to the more famous bridges of Mostar and Višegrad. In March 1945, in the closing phase of the Second World War, the bridge was destroyed and its arches brought down into the river, severing the old town between the two banks. For more than sixty years the crossing remained broken, crossed by a temporary structure, while the stones of the original arches lay in the Neretva. Reconstruction was completed in 2009, using the surviving original stones recovered from the riverbed together with new dressed stone matched to the original, on the basis of historic documentation and photographs. The reconstructed bridge is a designated national monument of Bosnia & Herzegovina.