On Wednesday, August 24th, our bus left Dubrovnik and crossed the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina three times (Dubrovnik doesn’t actually have a land connection with the rest of Croatia), without incident or much delay. Once in Herzegovina for good, we stopped at the village of Pocitelj for Bosnian coffee—like Turkish coffee (with grounds in the cup), but differing somehow in when the sugar goes in, or something like that. There we saw our first mosque.—the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina is predominantly Muslim, though after the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the 1992-1996 war, it is a federation of two areas, a joint Muslim-Catholic part to the west and south and the Serb Republic to the east and north.
We went on to Mostar, where we walked over the famous 16th-century Turkish Old Bridge, a UNESCO Heritage site, which had been destroyed by the Croatians in 1993 and rebuilt in 2004. A guy was going around the crowd on the bridge, collecting money for another local man who was about to dive off the bridge—a tourist-pleasing stunt like the cliff-divers at Acapulco, but less dangerous. “Just another ten euros and he’ll jump!”
We had a nice lunch nearby at a restaurant called Sadrvan, then went on up the valley of the Neretva River to Jablanica, where we visited a museum dedicated to one of the more important occurrences of the World War II Partisan war against the Germans. Tito there, in March 1943, outmaneuvered the Germans, crossing the Neretva by building a temporary bridge on the ruins of a wrecked railroad bridge, bringing across even his wounded. The bridge was later rebuilt by the Germans, but, no longer needed because the rail line had been moved, it was blown up again in 1968 for the most expensive film ever made in Yugoslavia, The Battle of the Neretva. The remains of this bridge were left as a tourist attraction in conjunction with the later museum
.
There appears to be a widespread nostalgia in the successor states (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo) of the former Yugoslavia for Tito and Yugoslavia itself. Polls indicate that most former Yugoslavians say that they were better off before 1991. Yet, they end up electing nationalist parties. Without Tito to keep it all together with an iron hand, no ethnic group trusts any of the others. This is not a matter of ancient tribal hatreds. The Serbs suffered horribly at the hands of the Nazis’ Croatian puppet state during World War II and, with substantial Serbian populations in Croatia and Bosnia, when Yugoslavia started falling apart in the 1990s, they lived by the rule “Do unto others before they do unto you.”
We finally arrived in Sarajevo, the capital and largest city of Bosnia, checked into our hotel (the five-star Hotel Europe, right in the heart of town), and went to dinner together at a restaurant (I forget the name) where we had Bosnian cuisine (cevapcici, according to Wikipedia: “a dish of obelisk-shaped minced meat that is traditionally prepared on a wooden charcoal grill”). Good stuff.
We went on to Mostar, where we walked over the famous 16th-century Turkish Old Bridge, a UNESCO Heritage site, which had been destroyed by the Croatians in 1993 and rebuilt in 2004. A guy was going around the crowd on the bridge, collecting money for another local man who was about to dive off the bridge—a tourist-pleasing stunt like the cliff-divers at Acapulco, but less dangerous. “Just another ten euros and he’ll jump!”
We had a nice lunch nearby at a restaurant called Sadrvan, then went on up the valley of the Neretva River to Jablanica, where we visited a museum dedicated to one of the more important occurrences of the World War II Partisan war against the Germans. Tito there, in March 1943, outmaneuvered the Germans, crossing the Neretva by building a temporary bridge on the ruins of a wrecked railroad bridge, bringing across even his wounded. The bridge was later rebuilt by the Germans, but, no longer needed because the rail line had been moved, it was blown up again in 1968 for the most expensive film ever made in Yugoslavia, The Battle of the Neretva. The remains of this bridge were left as a tourist attraction in conjunction with the later museum
.
There appears to be a widespread nostalgia in the successor states (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo) of the former Yugoslavia for Tito and Yugoslavia itself. Polls indicate that most former Yugoslavians say that they were better off before 1991. Yet, they end up electing nationalist parties. Without Tito to keep it all together with an iron hand, no ethnic group trusts any of the others. This is not a matter of ancient tribal hatreds. The Serbs suffered horribly at the hands of the Nazis’ Croatian puppet state during World War II and, with substantial Serbian populations in Croatia and Bosnia, when Yugoslavia started falling apart in the 1990s, they lived by the rule “Do unto others before they do unto you.”
We finally arrived in Sarajevo, the capital and largest city of Bosnia, checked into our hotel (the five-star Hotel Europe, right in the heart of town), and went to dinner together at a restaurant (I forget the name) where we had Bosnian cuisine (cevapcici, according to Wikipedia: “a dish of obelisk-shaped minced meat that is traditionally prepared on a wooden charcoal grill”). Good stuff.
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