Mostar, Hercegovina

On our way back to Sarajevo, we stopped for just half a day in the old Ottoman town of Mostar, in Hercegovina. Indira explained to me ahead of time that the town was very split, between the Bosnian Muslim population and the Croatians who had stuck out the war in the area and wanted to make their presence felt, despite the fact that, or perhaps more precisely because, the town had become part of what is now officially "Muslim" Bosnia-Hercegovina. Upon arriving there, the divisions weren't hard to notice: there was an enormous cross perched upon a large hill that overlooked the city, and a new, brightly-illuminated bell-fry, also topped by a cross, which competed with the minarets that otherwise dominated Mostar's skyline. I was suprirsed to learn that on one side of the city most places accept kuna, the Croatian currency (which worked out well enough for me as I had some left over from the trip to Dubrovnik).

However, as we made our way to the heart of the old city, which runs along the Neretva River, I was struck by the place. As the town was Ottoman for most of the centuries of its existence, it somehow gave me the feeling – more than any place I’ve ever been - of what it might have felt like to live in an Ottoman town in the Balkans, a world I spend much of my time trying to enter through newspapers and postcards, rather than on foot ... so that was quite a treat.

The other touching thing about our visit there was seeing – and standing on – the famous Mostar bridge, built by the Ottomans in the 16th-century and destroyed after fighting in the area in the '90's, which, Indira explained to me, had broken "every Bosnian’s heart," as it has come to be a symbol of their country. It is now standing again, after being rebuilt last year through a combination of loans from the World Bank and aid from Turkey and elsewhere, though much of the city is still noticeably in ruins, more so even than Sarajevo. (Because the Catholic-Muslim divide in the city actually exists in palpable form - each group is associated with one or the other side of the river - descriptions of the reconstruction project tell how its aims included actually and symbolically linking the two sides).

As the sun began to set, we sat by the bridge, right along the river, drinking Bosnians’ version of Turkish coffee (which, others claim, is in turn simply a second-rate version of the Arabic kind, though I like the Turkish kind well enough) and eating baklava, trying to bide our time until our bus came at 12:30 that night, which was heading back to Sarajevo, where I was slated to take a plane back to Istanbul the next morning. All of that, at least, went as planned. More later on Istanbul, my current home.