Dubrovnik Days: Day 3, Leaving and a Side Trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina

On Day 3, we enjoyed a bit more wandering through the Old Town and a great drive overlooking the city on our way out.  Above is a photo of one of the many water fountains which are part of Dubrovnik's medieval water system.  We saw people filling their water bottles in the various fountains.

As we left Dubrovnik, we took a detour into Bosnia-Herzegovina.  We had already gone through a tiny stretch of this country when we drove to Dubrovnik.  In fact, unless you come to Dubrovnik by boat, you must go through a Bosnian town called Neum to get there.  This time though we purposely went through the Bosnian countryside, maybe an hour or so from the Croatian border, to go to a city called Mostar.

Mostar--and the ride through the Bosnian countryside--were unlike what we'd seen so far during our time in the former Yugoslavia.  As we drove through Mostar, we saw buildings with bullet holes, with roofs that were blown off, and with burned-out centers.  All of this occurred during the war in the early 1990s.

When the four of us and my mother-in-law went to Plitvicka Jezera (the largest national park in Croatia), on one of the roads to get there, we had seen buildings riddled with bullet holes and new churches, replacing the ones that had been shelled during the war in the 1990s.  We weren't mentally prepared for that, nor were we ready for what we saw in Mostar.

While in Mostar, we were also struck by the mosques--something we hadn't seen in Croatia or Slovenia.  Croatia is an overwhelmingly Catholic country, while Bosnia-Herzegovina has a real mix of Muslims, Orthodox, and Catholics.  In Mostar, we saw mosques and Catholic churches near one another.

Also striking was a Muslim cemetery in which every gravestone marks the grave of a person who died in 1993, 1994, or 1995.  The rows and rows of gravestones with names and photographs of often young Bosnians, as well as Arabic writing, were very moving.

Stari Most (Old Bridge) in Mostar; note the mosque just behind the bridge on the right side

Perhaps most striking of all--once we read the story about it--was Stari Most (Old Bridge).  As an article in Architecture Week explains, the bridge, built in the 1500s as part of the Ottoman Empire, "not only connected the city physically but, by the 20th century, had come to symbolize the coming together of many nationalities and ethnicities."  The bridge survived until 1993 when Croats shelled it so much that it went crumbling into the Neretva River.  International assistance allowed this important and beautiful bridge to be rebuilt, using local materials, in the early 2000s.

On a much lighter note, here's something that we saw in a touristy shop near the bridge.  It's called "Beautiful Barbie"; I presume it's a knock-off of the real thing.  As you can see, these Barbies are blue-eyed and pale-faced and in a kind of Turkish costume.  I realize that Turks have many different skin and eye colors, but still I found these Barbie knock-offs to have an interesting combination of traits.

Note too that the price is advertised in Euros (€) (though Bosnia is not a member of the European Union), as well as in the Bosnian currency, the Convertible Mark (Konvertibilna Marka, or KM).  While in Mostar, we paid for some things in Euros and some in Kuna (Croatia's currency, abbreviated in Croatia as KN and internationally as HRK).

Laura