Mostar
Mostar is a bridge with a town around it. In 1566 the Ottoman architect Hayruddin threw a single arch of pale stone twenty-nine metres across the green Neretva — legend says he prepared his own funeral the day the scaffolding came down — and for four hundred and twenty-seven years the young men of the town proved themselves by diving from it. On the ninth of November 1993, in a war between neighbours, the bridge was shelled into the river. In 2004 it came back, stone by stone, cut from the same quarry, and the divers came back with it. Around it, the bazaar of the coppersmiths, the minaret with the view, the crooked little bridge that was its rehearsal, and, a few streets west, a boulevard where the front line ran and the buildings still say so.
The traveller crosses the bridge slowly, because the stones are polished and steep and because that is what it is for; climbs the minaret of the Koski Mehmed Pasha mosque for the photograph everyone has and the view nobody tires of; walks the Kujundžiluk and buys something hammered; finds the small stone by the bridge that says 'Don't forget' and reads it; walks the Bulevar and the Spanish Square, where the Gymnasium has been repaired and the sniper tower has not, without a guide's opinions if possible; and, in the afternoon, drives to Blagaj, where a dervish house sits under a cliff at the source of a river, and, with time, to the Kravice falls.
The Guide's honesty, which here is careful: Mostar is one city and two shores, and its people, of every name, are tired of visitors who arrive knowing which side they are on — do not ask anyone which side they are on; the divers on the bridge collect money before they jump and are professionals, not a spectacle to be hurried; the day-trippers from Dubrovnik and Split fill the bridge between eleven and four — sleep here and own it at seven; the stone is an oven in August; the coffee is Bosnian, thick, and served with a sugar cube and time — take the time; and the war is thirty years old and everywhere: look, listen, do not lecture. The bridge is a memory in dignity. So is the town.