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![]() This video mixes different sights and sounds from our short visit to the enchanting and haunting city of Mostar, the largest city in the country's southern region - Herzegovina. Although we arrived towards the end of the tourism season, the Old Town, bazaar and Stari Most, were buzzing with locals, visitors from Europe, the Middle East, Eastern Asia & Australia (and of course the cats and dogs that seem to rule the streets :) ).Their soft roars merge with the sounds of rivers that weave between + beneath city streets, the calls to prayer that echoes between mosques and the persistent quiet that infiltrates many small places in this city.
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![]() Mostar was a challenging city for me to visit. It was the first time I have entered a recently active war zone. The first time I've seen a landscape with marks of brutality and opposition in every view. When we first entered Mostar, our bus drove through tight streets of stone + cement homes and shop fronts. From my window I could see the walls race by, flat walls turned to lace with bullet holes. I had heard of the war in Bosnia, remember many young people joining my classes in high school as their families had to flee to other countries, but never could imagine the destruction that happened here - never expected a town still in ruins so many years later. So when we first arrived I was afraid - not sure that I was safe after the startling first views. I saw the graffiti on the walls screaming political or football inclinations, but dripping in ethnic tension. It seems as though the divisions between the Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs continues to permeate all realms of life. One day I saw a group of five or six men working on a concrete building on my street. A couple loaded gravel from the street into wheelbarrows, hooked them to ropes as others hauled them to the fourth floor to mix for concrete. They were repairing a battered building or finishing one of many that were frozen in construction many years ago. Their tools were so simple and their work seemed so slow and heavy. I saw the effort in recovery - a layer of Mostar that seems slow and heavy, recovering from so many wounds. ![]() It took an entire day to relax & realize that the blasted walls are not a sign to fear, but in fact a backdrop of a familiar kind of everyday life. The town mixes the picturesque and touristic Old Town with quiet mansion-laden residential areas, high-rises, river parks and buzzing university campuses, all with a mix of war-ruins within. It's a bizarre, sad and lovely town, filled with lively energy, good food, music, & smiling, resilient faces. The famous bridge of Mostar, the Stari Most, presents a wonderful story of the city on its own. It was first commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent, a massive feat of Ottoman construction - 90 feet long and 64 feet above the river's surface. It stood for four and a half centuries, connecting the east and west towns. Until in 1993 it was exploded during the Croat-Bosniak war, for strategy or intentional destruction of a shared culture. Many people (mostly Muslim Bosniaks) were stranded on the west side with little food, water and no electricity for months. A small cable bridge was raised in its place. In 2001 an international coalition sponsored the reconstruction of the Stari Most, hiring many experts in Ottoman-style construction to reproduce the bridge using many of the original stones. As the bridge was once destroyed in hate of ethnic differences it was raised again in hope of joining these diverse peoples. The struggle goes on... Om Nom Bosnian Foods :) |
AuthorAn Upstate New York-grown, art history + Italian major turned organic farm volunteer turned Home Health Aide turned Landscape Architecture Grad student currently adventuring about the globe and taking far too many photos for one travel blog to handle. Archives
December 2017
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