Bosnia and Herzegovina

🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina

Mostar

Mostar is one of the most dramatically situated cities in the Balkans — a city of minarets and church towers in a limestone gorge of the Neretva River, where the Ottoman Stari Most (Old Bridge) rebuilt in 2004 after its deliberate destruction in 1993 stands as the most powerful symbol of post-war reconciliation in Europe. The original bridge, built in 1566 by the Ottoman architect Mimar Hayruddin, stood for 427 years before a Croat artillery shell brought it down during the Bosnian War — its UNESCO reconstruction from the same Tenelija limestone used in the 16th century was a statement of intent by the city and by the wider post-war generation. The Old Bridge area (Stari Grad) on both sides of the Neretva remains Bosnia's most complete Ottoman urban landscape — the Kujundžiluk bazaar, the Koski Mehmed Pasha Mosque, the hammam and the Muslibegović House are all within walking distance. In summer, professional divers and brave tourists leap from the bridge's 21 m arch into the ice-cold Neretva as part of a tradition that has been maintained without interruption since the bridge's original construction.

🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina

Sarajevo

Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, population 340,000, in the valley of the Miljacka River surrounded by the Dinaric Alps — one of the most historically layered cities in Europe, where four cultures (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav Communist and post-war Bosnian) have built physically on top of each other in a city the size of a provincial European town, creating a density of contrasting architecture, cuisine, religious buildings and living memory that no other European city matches. The Ottoman Baščaršija bazaar (the 15th-century copper smiths' quarter, the historic market of Sarajevo — the old Ottoman trading city) is 500 metres from the Austro-Hungarian Vijećnica (the National Library, 1896, the most ornate pseudo-Moorish building in the Balkans, burned by Serb shelling in 1992 destroying 2 million books, now restored) and 500 metres from the Latin Bridge where Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, triggering the First World War. The 1984 Winter Olympics (the only Winter Olympics held in a socialist country; Sarajevo 1984 was the first Winter Olympics held in a predominantly Muslim city; the venues — Jahorina, Bjelašnica, Igman — were shelled during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War and have since been restored) and the 1992-1995 Siege of Sarajevo (the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare: 1,425 days, longer than the Siege of Leningrad; 13,952 people killed, 5,434 of whom were civilians; the Tunnel of Hope was the only supply route under the airport runway) define Sarajevo's modern identity. Sarajevo is also the place where East genuinely meets West — the four-faiths coexistence (the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque, the Old Orthodox Church, the Ashkenazi Synagogue and the Sacred Heart Cathedral within 500 metres of each other in the Baščaršija district is the most concentrated expression of Abrahamic religious coexistence in Europe).