Mediterranean Chronicles # 3: On the way to Mostar

Mostar is not reduced to its reconstructed bridge or the official narratives of reconciliation. As one walks through this city marked by war, amid fragmented memories, Ottoman legacies, and contemporary realities, this text explores the visible and invisible traces left by recent history. Between persistent pain, urban recompositions, and travelers’ gazes, it questions what it still means to “make a city” in a Mediterranean where bridges symbolize both fractures and possible connections to rebuild.

“They dared to kill the Old Man!” This is how my friend Predrag Matvejevitch, author of the famous Mediterranean Breviary, exclaimed to share his pain and indignation at the destruction of the famous bridge of Mostar on November 9, 1993, by Croatian nationalists of the HVO. Built under the Ottoman Empire in 1566 by a master builder named Haïrudin during the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, the bridge of Mostar was much more than an emblem of the city. “It remains forever linked to my childhood and adolescence memories,” observes Matvejevitch. “We simply called it ‘the Old Man,’ as one does with a comrade or a father; we would meet on ‘the Old Man,’ we would swim under ‘the Old Man,’ the most daring among us would jump ‘from the top of the Old Man’ into the Neretva. [1]”

Mostar is one of those martyr cities of the war in the former Yugoslavia, alongside Sarajevo, Vukovar, or Srebrenica. From the moment one enters the city, the extent of the past disaster is apparent, with numerous cemeteries right there, laid out before our eyes, as an undeniable reminder of a past that does not fade. The pain and humiliation from the violence of this fratricidal war are not truly buried in memories. They surface while walking through the city, which remains very divided today, between community and religious affiliations. Is there a common world or a City in Mostar today? Nothing is less certain, despite the reconstruction of the bridge in July 2004, presented as a living symbol of possible reunions, through a soothing and artificial discourse held by international organizations, particularly the European Union, around a pseudo “reconciliation.”