Balkan Tour: Bosnia

Our tour bus collected a few American tourists and we were off to Bosnia. Snaking our way through the mountains, past refuge homes that were haphazardly built, but are now permanent homes and down past the Neretva River. The Bosnian architecture is very Ottoman influenced with many mosques and a singular cathedral , St Mary’s, dotting the Mostar cityscape.

As we wandered through the old town streets, past the Kriva cuprija, a stone one-arch bridge, the sky grew more and more ominous, with the sunshine completely disappearing. As our group knew each other quite well, the very grumpy old ladies Americans kept shushing us, which made us giggle all the more. The “Old Bridge” of Stari Most had to be rebuilt after the Bosnian-Croat war, exactly as it had been. It had been an engineering feat of its day. It was a stone arched bridge that sat high over the river. A man came out and was going to dive off of it, which is quite a popular thing for the locals to do. I don’t think you could have paid me enough to want to jump off that. Maybe 15 years ago, but not now.

Many of the buildings were still bullet riddled, and partially demolished from the war. You could still see the scars, but the streets were teeming with life. One of the recently remodelled buildings we went into was of a typical upper class Muslim family, Bišćevića ćošak. It was interesting to see how the house was once like a few hundred years ago, and how they conducted businesses in the Turkish/Muslim way of life. The decendents of the original family live in a building in the lower parts of the house still. In the main courtyard there were many turtles walking around which we did not think were real at first. Just as we concluded our tour, the thunder and lightning came with a vengeance, and it absolutely lashed from the heavens. Most of our group managed to duck into a small restaurant with the owner being the cook and the waiter. He served us all the same thing, but with 45 minutes until the bus was leaving he fed the 20 of us a scrumptious meal of kebabs, salad, potatoes and freshly squeezed juice. He was so happy with us group of girls and praised him for such a great meal, he gave us a free dessert that was just divine. We stole a peek into the cathedral just as they were starting mass, and it was back onto the bus where we had a final night at our hotel. The food there was bland and sort of awful, but the craic was great, and with the wine flowing, we laughed all the way to bed.