Mostar and its bridge, Herzegovina

Some towns are known for a cathedral or a castle. Mostar is known for a bridge. Stari Most, the Old Bridge, is a single stone arch thrown across the green Neretva in the heart of Herzegovina, so high and so slender that it seems to have been drawn rather than built. It has become the image of the town, of the region and, in the years since the war, of the possibility of putting broken things back together.

The bridge Suleiman ordered

The Old Bridge is an Ottoman monument. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent ordered it, and it was designed by the architect Mimar Hayruddin. Building began in the 1550s and the bridge was completed in 1566. It is a single arch of pale stone, and the hump in the middle is steep enough that crossing it on foot is a small climb.

Around it grew an Ottoman town of stone houses, mosques, workshops and bazaars, climbing the steep banks on either side of the river. The cobbled lanes that lead down to the bridge are still lined with little shops, and the minarets of the old town still rise above the roofs. The stone of the bridge and of the town is the colour of old bone in the midday light, and the river beneath is a colour not quite like anything else, a cold, bright green.

Destroyed and rebuilt

The bridge stood for more than four centuries, through empires, world wars and the Yugoslav state. It did not survive the war of the 1990s. In the fighting in Mostar, the bridge was shelled repeatedly, and on 9 November 1993 it fell into the Neretva. For many people outside the Balkans its loss summed up what the war was destroying.

After the war, the bridge was rebuilt. Work began in 2001, and the reconstructed bridge was inaugurated on 23 July 2004, and in 2005 UNESCO inscribed the Old Bridge Area of the Old City of Mostar on its World Heritage List. The new bridge looks so like the old that it is easy to forget that what you are walking on is younger than many of the people around you.

The divers

Mostar has another tradition that makes the bridge famous. The young men of the town dive from it, from the top of the arch into the river, a drop usually given as more than twenty metres, into water that is cold even in high summer. Divers have done it for as long as anyone knows, and a formal annual competition, held each summer, goes back to 1968. It is an alarming thing to watch, and the people who do it make it look easy, which is the point.

The trick with Mostar is to see the bridge from more than one place. From the top of the arch you look down the river and along the old town, and you feel how steep the crossing is underfoot. From the banks below, where the rocks run down to the water, you see the whole curve at once, with the sky through it, and understand why people have photographed it for as long as there have been cameras. From the lanes above, it appears and disappears between roofs. Each view says something different about it, and together they explain why a town of no great size has made a single arch the centre of its whole life.

It is also worth remembering, as you look, that the town was fought over within living memory. The bridge was rebuilt as a statement that the town on either side of it belonged together. Whether it has fully done that is a question for the people of Mostar. But the arch is there again, and people cross it every day.

Tours that reach Mostar

Two Balkan tours in the catalogue include Mostar.

Explore Worldwide's fifteen-night Balkans Rail Adventure is a long journey across seven countries. Its places run from Ljubljana and Lake Bled through Zagreb and the Plitvice Lakes National Park to Sarajevo and Mostar, then Dubrovnik, Tivat, Kotor and Bar, and on to Belgrade and Novi Sad. It has departures in May, June, August and September.

Travelsphere's twelve-night Balkan Highlights covers Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its places include Split, Zadar, Plitvice Lakes National Park, Zagreb, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Zlatibor and Višegrad, Sarajevo, Mostar, Medugorje and Trogir.

Mostar is at its busiest in the middle of the day, when coach parties arrive and the lanes to the bridge fill. If you can, come down to the river early or late, when the stone is warm with low light and the bridge is quiet. Stand on the bank below and look up. It is worth the climb down.