An Irishwoman’s Diary: Visiting Mostar 23 years on from its devastation

We’re here as day-trippers in an air-conditioned coach, crossing from Croatia through three border-points en route to Bosnia-Herzegovina and its southern city, Mostar. On the way in towards the Old Town, the new Muslim cemetery lines both sides of the road. It’s a startling sight of eye-cuttingly white obelisks and squares in marble. Later that day, when we make our way back there, we discover how each single tombstone is dated 1993, 1994, or 1995, marking the war dead of Bosnia, brutalised and murdered by Serbian forces.

Mostar isn’t any average destination, much as the forces of positive tourism try to dumb down the complexity of the place. The city is probably best remembered for the collapse of the iconic Stari Most, or Old Bridge, on November 11th, 1993, when a barrage of shelling saw this 16th-century Ottoman-style bridge finally collapse into the river Neretva. Twenty-three years on, the city remains in a state of recovery, even if the 28m-wide Old Bridge has been perfectly restored. The similarly destroyed Franciscan Church has been completely restored, thanks to generous Vatican funds.

The steep, awkwardly traversed bridge attracts a steam of visitors, and we are all transfixed by the view down into the pellucid green river, not to mention the extremely fit young men preparing to dive in from a dangerous height when they have each accumulated €50. The tradition of the dive began in 1664, and in 1968 the city held a formal diving competition, which still continues to this day, requiring that the plunge to the river is never undertaken head-first as the water is extremely cold.

It’s a hot day in late June, so the narrow streets are thronged. After crossing the Old Bridge, we turn left towards the bazaar-like Kujundziluk. I’ve visited many bazaars over the years and I am familiar with the bartering and the vibrant atmosphere that accompanies the human exchange of goods. But it’s not that kind of place. Everything is for sale, much of it poor quality trinkets, and although people trade eagerly there is little time for pleasantries. This is business, and people are reserved.

Trauma

The city remains traumatised by the after effects of a sustained war (in which the UN didn’t intervene), one based on religious difference and historical resentment of many kinds, and I’m reminded at one point of my old history teacher’s voice in a sun-warmed classroom in Monaghan, speaking in Irish of the Ottoman Empire as “the sick man of Europe”, when the Balkan states finally emerged in their own right from beneath Turkish control.

Today, Bosnian Muslims are quite secular in both appearance and behaviour, with no segregation of the sexes in the Koski Mehmet Pa’a Mosque, and no head covering on the women.

Minaret

Once inside this modestly decorated Mosque, we climb to the minaret for one of the most beautiful views of a city simmering in the heat, the air cut across just then by the voices of muezzins calling out from other minarets.

The city bears the telltale signs of sniper-fire. Abandoned and some quite ancient buildings are pock-marked with bullet holes, like the skin on a smallpox-riddled face, while other, relatively new apartment blocks are inhabited again.

The lasting memory of the place for me though, has to be the sight of the children deposited every day within the Old Town, dropped off by gypsy parents in Mercedes cars, their task to sit and beg all day.

We pass many little girls, uncovered in the broiling sun, enduring hours on their own at the feet of thousands of tourists who brush by. Inevitably, people give money, as I do too to one child, uselessly I know. I also bring her an ice-cream, strawberry-flavoured, in a cone. Without looking up – because I am simply a hand thrust in her direction – she takes the money carefully, counts the coins and deposits them in a pocket in her dress, before she accepts the ice-cream.

Later, on the way back to the bus, temperatures have soared to 34 degrees, and outside the Franciscan Church a small boy is singing his heart out with all the verve of a star. He too is out in the full sun and I’m thinking it’s a strange world in which money can be found for the restoration of bridges and churches, but never to remove children from poverty. We move along, eager to reach the air-conditioned coach which will whisk us back to Croatia later that evening.