The Old Bridge at Mostar

 

Crossing international borders always has a funny feel to it, for me, at least. I’m not sure why. I know borders are simply manmade concepts. Arbitrary lines on maps that only apply to human beings. Animals, plants, breezes, sunshine, rain, rivers, oceans don’t seem to pay them any heed at all. But to people they can and often do mean and make a world of difference. Crossing international borders by air or by sea, arguably, feels somewhat more normal than crossing land boundaries. There’s something solid about making such a transition, passing through another element to get to your destination. Crossing the ether, or crossing the water, really does feel like a making a leap from one place to another. Land borders on the other hand – to me at any rate – have always felt somewhat more fuzzy, and sometimes far more sinister and forbidding.

 

I guess it has something to do with the checkpoints, with their barbed wire fences, their red and white swing-arm barriers, their uniforms, their guns, etc. Being asked to surrender your passport, especially when it is physically taken away from you and disappears somewhere out of sight in response to the ‘requirements’ of unseen checks and procedures. Similarly, hearing the loud clunk of the stamp being hammered into your passport when you have been cleared and approved is the quintessential sound of your arrival. It’s a very definite sound, it’s the sign that you can proceed, you can step over that invisible line, cross that threshold, pass through the boundary from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ Affirmative. You may proceed. Welcome to wherever you are.

 

I was quite young when I made my first land border crossing. It was on a trip to Amsterdam. We’d crossed the Channel by hovercraft – an oddly antiquated-yet-futuristic (and very sea-sickening) means of transport at the time, but now utterly defunct. We then travelled onwards by coach through France and Belgium to Holland. It was pre-Schengen era, so we stopped at each border and a very severe-no-nonsense-looking policeman boarded the coach and walked down the centre aisle. He collected up everyone’s passport and then exited the bus for a while. We all had to sit there and wait. It all felt very John Le Carré. The policeman later got back on-board, now accompanied by a fellow officer, and asked two young men sitting at the back of the bus, two British servicemen travelling in uniform (RAF, I think), to get off the bus for “further checks.” They eventually came back looking rather disgruntled and murmured that it was something which “happened every time.”

 

A local lad describing the daring tradition of bridge diving

As I was then still only a kid, seeing the heavy handguns hanging from these border policemen’s belts impressed me greatly. Back then, in the UK, you didn’t see many armed policemen. But something I recall equally vividly was looking out of the coach window when we were allowed to resume our journey. The bus motoring on, I keenly scrutinised the scenery as it began to slip past the window, trying to see what was different on this side of the border compared to the side we’d just left behind. In truth, I couldn’t see much of a difference at all. It all looked very boringly the same to me. It had been raining in France, and it was still raining here in Belgium.

 

That trip, and that very thought, came back to me many years later whilst I was on another overland trip. This time I was travelling from France to Spain; we crossed the border in the high Pyrenees mountains. There was no stopping for any border checkpoint due to Schengen. The only thing which told me we’d crossed the border from one country into another was a sign on the side of the road, but I noticed something far more distinctly, and that was a dramatic change in the style of the buildings. They were suddenly shaped very differently; their style and colour of roofing material was completely different too. Street signs looked different; different colours, different fonts, different sounding words, place names, different ideograms. Removing borders doesn’t always remove differences. There are satellite photos of Berlin taken at night which still, thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, distinctly show the area which used to be known as ‘West Berlin’ because the street lights there still use a different sort of lightbulb, which means the street lighting is a different colour to the rest of the city.

 

I’ve crossed other land borders, from the UK into France (via the Channel Tunnel); from France into Switzerland; from the USA into Canada; but there was something different about crossing the land border from Croatia into Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2016. I suppose in some ways it was akin to when I crossed over from West Germany into East Germany, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s was now some 25 years ago. Both of these newly independent states were once part of that defunct Federation, but only Croatia has since joined the EU. Schengen doesn’t apply here. And so, our passports needed to be collected up and handed over. This time, thankfully though, it wasn’t an armed policeman eyeing us all suspiciously, but rather it was our tour guide, cheerily apologising for the inconvenience.

 

The border here is a bit strange, because there is a short stretch of coast which is Bosnia-Herzegovina and which cuts through the longer coastline of Croatia – hence a deal has been struck on certain stretches of the coast road to allow Croatians (and their visiting tourists) to get from one part of their country to the other without the need for passport checks. Here though we tourists were crossing the border proper and turning right, heading away from the sea, motoring inland for the day to visit the town of Mostar. Our tour guide shuffled back down the aisle, returning our passports. Opening them, we were each slightly disappointed to find we hadn’t acquired a stamp that read “Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Despite the border checkpoint, us day-trippers are exempt – on the condition that we leave by the same point of entry before the end of the day. It might feel like a merely arbitrary line on a map, but the point is that it’s a line which is a closely monitored one.

 

As we motored on, I looked out of the window and I remembered once again those border crossing thoughts I first had as a kid on my way to Amsterdam, and then once again many years later when I crossed over from France into Spain, because here too I can see a distinct difference. The houses are different, the roads look different, and, because we are heading inland, the scenery begins to look a little different too. There are genuine cultural differences here though. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a largely Muslim country (whereas Croatia is predominantly Christian). Orthodox and Catholic Christians form the next sizable religious group. And, like several other formerly Ottoman controlled Balkan states, its population is ethnically diverse – predominantly home to Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats. Relationships between these different groups historically has been fraught, especially in the wake of the collapse of the Yugoslav state in 1991, hence the bloody civil war which was fought here until 1996. In many respects the town of Mostar is a symbol of that mix and those tensions.

 

Mostar was symbolic before the Bosnian war, as a town divided between Muslims and Christians, and a town divided by a river, but with both sides united by a remarkable bridge of stunning architectural grace and beauty. It took nine years to build and was completed sometime around 1566-1567. Commissioned by the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, it was intended to be a more durable replacement for a wooden suspension bridge. The building works were overseen by a man named Mimar Hayruddin or Mimar Hajrudin. Some stories state that Hajrudin was commissioned under pain of death should the bridge fail, and that he ran away on the day that the scaffolding was removed, such was his fear that the bridge would not hold. But it did hold – and in fact it stood for more than 400 years; until on the 9^th November 1993 it was deliberately destroyed by the Christian Bosnian-Croat artillery who were perched on the high ground of the steep hill overlooking the town.

 

The hill from which the Old Bridge was destroyed by artillery fire in 1993

The smaller Ottoman bridge at Mostar

Hajrudin’s achievement was an unparalleled feat of engineering at the time. Some 30 metres in length and its soffit around 20 metres in height from the beautiful turquoise waters of the River Neretva below, it was then the largest single span stone arch which had ever been constructed. A smaller bridge of the same design can be found close by to the main bridge at Mostar, which some people believe was constructed in order to test out the practical application of the theory behind this type of bridge construction technique – an architectural form which was subsequently used in other extant bridges in various parts of the Ottoman Empire (see here). As is often the way, when such things of great age and beauty are destroyed, that destruction enables us to better understand the mysteries as to how exactly they were built – much like the monumental stone Buddha statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 (see here). But, unlike the Bamiyan Buddhas, the “Old Bridge” (Stari Most) at Mostar has been rebuilt.

 

Its destruction was a highly symbolic act, hence so too was its reconstruction. At the time there was no military tactical or defensive reason for destroying the bridge, other than to symbolically break that cross-cultural unity which the bridge itself represented. Rebuilding it was seen as more than just a physical reconstruction project. To reinstate the bridge as accurately as it had been before was widely seen to be a matter of the utmost importance. Consequently, an international cooperative effort was mobilised to make it happen, with several countries – including Italy, Turkey, Hungary, the Netherlands, as well as the Croatian and Bosnian governments – contributing funds, equipment, expertise and manpower to the project. As many of the original stones as possible were recovered and reused from the riverbed. And a lot was learned in the process, particularly regarding the three types of stone (soft local Tenelija limestone, harder Dolomite limestone, and local Breca, a porous conglomerate) which were utilised for their differing properties, as well as the metallurgical materials and methods, using iron swallow-tailed clamps, pins and molten lead, which were used to brace, hold and lock the stonework firmly into place, plus the unique type of mortar which was used to cement the masonry – an unusual pink coloured mortar which was thought to have been the main reason why the river ran red like the Old Bridge itself was bleeding once it had been felled.

 

Some of the original stones from the Old Bridge which were not reused

It took three years to rebuild the Old Bridge, re-opening some eleven years after its destruction in 2004. The timeless elegance of that perfectly circular arch which had previously withstood four centuries, unchanging while various rulers came a went, from the Ottomans to the collapse of the Communist Eastern Bloc, really does appear to have defied the passage of time; especially now, having arisen once more like a phoenix from the ashes of a bitterly divisive civil war. Photographs of the bridge before and after the recent conflict look almost indistinguishable. And rather poignantly, a rooftop nearby in the heart of the old town overlooking the riverbank is painted with large letters which read: “Don’t forget, but do forgive forever.”

 

Mostar is a very beautiful town. There are many things to see here besides the famous Old Bridge and its smaller, and more secluded identical-twin which escaped the recent war unscathed – there are mosques, churches, caves, old cobbled streets and little craft shops, restaurants and cafes. To see Mostar now it is hard to believe such terrible things could have happened here so recently. But crossing such a bridge is a reminder that boundaries are all around us – not just the borders which separate nation from nation, nor the ideas and beliefs which separate cultures and religions, but the phases of peace and war, of one political form of governance from its predecessor and its successor, for these are both the seen and unseen boundaries by which we measure the stretches of time which mark off in our collective social conscious. It’s such boundaries, both temporal and geographical, which demarcate our lives and the lives of those who have gone before us. But how we choose to cross those boundaries and connect the two sides of these cognitive or imaginary divides is what shapes our worlds as well as the futures which we bequeath to those who come after us.

 

On some levels, maintaining borders and boundaries may well be a necessary fact of life, but surely acknowledging such borders and boundaries whilst also facilitating and enabling safe and easy passage, mending broken bridges, and allowing everyone to cross them without bias or favour, without fear or discrimination, is by far a better means of healing such divides and rifts. Unity and diversity needn’t be mutually exclusive – because, like the Old Bridge at Mostar, they are the twinned opposites which join together the two ends of a perfect circle. Boundaries and borders are, in fact, the places where we meet, cross over, merge, and return.

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