Jumping from a Lost Bridge

The city of Mostar is just a couple hours away from Trebinje, but somehow it feels like a different country. Here Latin letters replace Cyrillic and the Islamic call to prayer replaces church bells. The skyline of Mostar at sunset is a silhouette of minarets. While Trebinje has the feel of a backwater, Mostar is maybe the number one tourist attraction of the country. Crowds wander the souvenir shops and restaurants of the cobbled old town streets and they all come to see something that isn’t even here anymore.

A heat wave swept through the region on the day we left Trebinje. We loaded our many overpacked bags into an old taxi with no air-conditioning and sweated for the next two hours as we drove through the barren hills towards Mostar.

It was extra unfortunate that the road to our apartment in Mostar was under construction and we couldn’t drive in, but rather had to drag our heavy luggage though the scorching mid-day heat for some distance to get there.

The amount of luggage with which we travel is embarrassing and very inconvenient. A simple trip turns into a hellish journey of dragging luggage around over cobble stoned streets, struggling to get up stairs and trying to figure out how to fit everything in taxis.

There’s a reason for all the luggage though. These bags are our home in a way. They hold everything we have, from our many electronics to schoolbooks for the kids and exotic spices and ingredients that Tola uses in her cooking. I’ve reduced everything to the essentials so that I now have just a single pair of pants, a pair of shorts and a few t-shirts. Still, our luggage is many and heavy.

Tourists come to Mostar to see the famous Stari Most, an old stone arch bridge. It was built in 1557 during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent when the Ottomans ruled over the region. The city itself is named after the bridge which is so high and wide that it quickly became the defining landmark of the region. Unfortunately, the bridge that everyone comes to see is no longer there.

The Neretva River runs swiftly through Mostar, whitewater sparkling in places, and the old bridge has for centuries connected the two halves of the city over the deep gorge of the river. Still hot in the early evening, we walked to old bridge, a place where tourists converge for pictures. For centuries, adventurous locals have jumped from the bridge into the deep, cold water eighty feet below. A local boy in swim shorts is collecting money from tourists to jump. I’m in swim shorts too and plan to go in, but not from this height. At this height even a perfect landing would be painful. A number of people have died from this jump.

Instead we make our way down to the riverbank where I jump in from a more comfortable height of 3 feet and enjoy the cold water while I struggle with the strong current. I can see the boy walking back and forth on the bridge above continuing to collect money. Once in a while he stands on the edge and stretches as if he is getting ready to jump and then he goes back to collecting money. The tourists are waiting for it, cameras ready.

Mostar suffered terribly during the Bosnian war of the 1990s, enduring more destruction than anywhere else in the country. It was a city where Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosniaks all lived together without a majority religion and when Yugoslavia became divided along religious lines, three different groups laid claim to the city. The scars of years of siege are visible throughout the city in the bombed out ruins on every block and pock marked apartment buildings that offer tourist accommodations today.

Mosques and churches were shot up, snipers hid in wait in abandoned towers and mortars rained down on the city leaving little standing but the centuries old Ottoman bridge from which the town was named. A symbol of the connection between the diverse communities of Mostar, the Old Bridge seemed to hold the city together even in the worst of times.

And then, in the last days of the war, the Croatian army shelled Stari Most until it collapsed into the water and was gone.

From the cold water, this hundred-degree day was no longer uncomfortable. Eighty-feet above me, the boy was still climbing along the edge collecting money for the jump. Thirty minutes of this had passed and many of the tourists that had gathered, camera ready, had given up and moved on, but new tourists had replaced them.

And then a man quietly stepped over the side of the bridge, a replica of the original, and dropped eighty feet into the water. And it is still the Old Bridge, even if now only 17 years old instead of 500.