A Bridge in Mostar

by Terry Chen

Mimar Hayruddin built the bridge in 1566 on orders from Suleiman the Magnificent. The story goes that Hayruddin was so afraid of failure he prepared his own funeral before the scaffolding was removed. The arch held. A single span of limestone, 29 meters across, 4 meters wide, rising in a pale crescent over the Neretva River. The stone was tenelia, a local limestone that whitens with age. Hayruddin used a system of iron cramps and lead mortar to lock the voussoirs together. The bridge stood for 427 years.

For most of those centuries, young men in Mostar jumped from the apex into the green water below, a drop of roughly 24 meters. It was a rite of passage. Tourists gathered on the banks. The bridge connected the east and west sides of the city. Muslim families lived primarily on one side. Croat families on the other. The bridge was the seam.

On November 9, 1993, Croatian Defence Council forces shelled it. They used a tank positioned on the hillside above the west bank. The bombardment lasted two days. At 10:15 AM on November 9, the arch collapsed into the Neretva. Slobodan Praljak, the HVO commander who ordered the shelling, later said at his war crimes trial in The Hague that the bridge was a legitimate military target. The International Criminal Tribunal disagreed. The bridge carried no military traffic. It carried people walking to market.

A temporary cable bridge was strung across the gap. For eight years the city lived with the absence. The stumps of the old abutments stood on either bank like broken teeth.

Reconstruction began in 2001, funded by the World Bank, UNESCO, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, and the governments of Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Hungarian army divers descended into the Neretva and pulled 1,088 original stone blocks from the riverbed. Each block was catalogued, measured, and assessed. Engineers from the Turkish firm Er-Bu Construction studied Ottoman building techniques from the sixteenth century. They cut new tenelia stone from the same quarries Hayruddin had used. Where original blocks were sound, they were incorporated into the new arch. Where they were too damaged, new stone took their place, cut and dressed by the same methods.

The rebuilt bridge opened on July 23, 2004. Thousands gathered. Some wept. In 2005, UNESCO designated the Old Bridge Area of the Old City of Mostar a World Heritage Site.

I have stood on that bridge. The stone is smooth from five centuries of footsteps and fifteen years of new ones. You cannot tell, looking at the arch, which blocks are original and which are replacement. That is the point.

When something is destroyed, the instinct is to build something new. Faster. Modern. The people who rebuilt the Stari Most rejected that instinct. They went to the bottom of the river and recovered what they could. They studied how the original was made. They matched the material, the method, the intent. Reconstruction was slower than new construction would have been. It was also the only approach that could produce a bridge people would trust to walk across.

Organizations break the same way bridges do. Slowly, under stress, then all at once. The teams that rebuild well do what the divers did in the Neretva. They go back to the original material. They recover what was sound. They study how things were joined before the shelling started. They do not pretend the collapse did not happen. They build the new arch with the old stones.

The jump from the bridge resumed in 2004. Young men still leap from the apex into the green water. The river receives them the way it always has.