Stari Most

Before the stone bridge, a wooden suspension span crossed the Neretva at this point, and the settlement on its banks was already known for its mostari — the keepers who watched the crossing. In the 1560s the Ottoman court ordered a permanent bridge, and the work is traditionally attributed to the architect Mimar Hayruddin, a pupil of the great Sinan. Legend says he was given three days to raise the scaffold or be killed; when the supports were finally removed, the arch held. The result was a single hump of pale local limestone, barely two metres wide at the crest, with no railing — a bridge that demanded a steady nerve from anyone crossing it in winter ice or wind. It stood for 427 years. On 9 November 1993, during the siege of the city, the bridge collapsed into the Neretva under shelling. The loss was felt far beyond Mostar: it had joined a Muslim quarter on the east bank to a Croat one on the west, and its fall became the war’s most iconic image of cultural destruction. An international reconstruction project recovered hundreds of original stone blocks from the riverbed, cut replacements from the same quarry, and reopened the bridge in July 2004. In 2005 the old bridge area was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.