Across the Great Divide

• Share

Rusmir Cisic, a Bosnian muslim engineer, remembers the day his native Mostar lost the bridge from which the city takes its name. For more than four centuries the Stari Most, or Old Bridge, linked the Mediterranean and Ottoman worlds, Christianity and Islam, West and East. Its graceful arch and stone towers in southeastern Bosnia were a meeting place for Serbs, Croats and Muslims as well as travelers from as far away as Istanbul and Glasgow. That ended with the Bosnian war, when the Neretva River became a front line between the town's Croat and Muslim residents. Some tried to protect their bridge by swaddling it in old blankets and rubber tires. But the shelling continued, and one bleak November morning in 1993 the arch finally gave way, disappearing beneath the green waters below. "We all cried," says Cisic.

Now he and fellow Mostar residents, with funding from the international community, have begun the task of bringing it back. Residents gathered last month to watch craftsmen shape the first stone. Cisic estimates reconstruction will require 18 months to complete. Other wounds will take longer to heal. Muslims and Croats still lead separate lives in Mostar, but the project does at least represent a small ray of hope. Emir Balic, 67, a diver who leapt more than 1,000 times from the top of the span into the shallow waters as part of an annual competition, says he now plans to do so one more time: "People will at least gather around the bridge and talk again," he says. "Time will help us reconcile."

The new bridge has been designed as an exact replica of the span erected in 1566 by the famous Ottoman architect Mimar Hajrudin under the rule of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. It was an early architectural marvel, linking the high banks with an improbably long arch of white stone more than 20 m high. One traveler likened the bridge to a bow stretched toward heaven, another to a rainbow — an impression shared by holidaymakers into the modern era because of the pink light that bathes the valley in summer.

Turkish builders overseeing the construction will use 140 of the original stones. The remaining 1,088 have been cut from the same quarry that Ottoman builders used in the 16th century. These massive limestone blocks, engineers say, are unique to the region in their combination of porousness and durability. One thing that won't be reproduced is the mortar used to hold the stones together, which was said to be mixed from goat hair and egg shells.

Mending the ethnic wounds is going to prove harder. The Stari Most was destroyed by a Croat shell not because of its strategic significance but because of what it stood for — the ethnic cohabitation of Muslim, Croat and Serb. The Croat commander whose unit deliberately brought the bridge down alluded to that when he said the ancient landmark was "not worth even the finger of one Croat soldier." Today, Mostar's Muslims and Croats (the Serbs fled during the war) do not mix much, keeping to their respective banks of the river, especially after dark. They don't share the same feelings about the bridge, either. While Muslims are uniformly enthusiastic, Croats say its significance — and the importance of the reconstruction effort — has been overblown by Muslims who want to stress the town's Ottoman roots. "The bridge is not a symbol of all of Mostar," complains Croat newspaper columnist Darko Juka. But even Croats like Juka are ready to recognize that a new bridge will bring much-needed money to the town from foreign tourists. Emir Balic, the diver, is just waiting to take that plunge. "I live," he says, "to see the arch again."