A church destroyed in Croatia during fighting around Lipik.
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The
Mostar Bridge: rebirth of an emblem
It took no more than 30 minutes for Stari
Most (“The Old Bridge”), the emblematic symbol of Mostar’s multicultural past, to
be destroyed by bombardment from a Croatian army tank on November 9, 1993. Completed
in 1566 after nine years of work, the bridge, designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar
Hayruddin, once rose high above the emerald waters of the Neretva, connecting its
east and west banks.
The 29-metre-long stone arch bridge gave the town its name
and stimulated its blossoming from a tiny medieval settlement to a thriving trading
centre that attracted merchants and travellers from across the region. This is where
local couples romanced and young men dove into the river below in a famed annual
contest. At the outbreak of the war, inhabitants cushioned the bridge with car tyres
in an attempt to protect the structure. It was first damaged in 1992 by Yugoslav
Army shelling.
As soon as the bridge was destroyed, local architects and heritage experts who had
fled the city started building a network to plan the reconstruction. In 1997, Hungarian
military divers from the NATO-led peackeeeping force in Bosnia salvaged the bridge’s
stone blocks from the river bed and hoisted them from the water with technical assistance
from the Hungarian bridge building company Hídépítö Rt.
In 1998, Unesco, the World Bank and the City of Mostar launched a project to rebuild
the bridge. Due to extensive damage, less of the salvaged stonework will be reused
than expected and stones will likely be extracted from a nearby quarry used by Stari
Most’s builders.
And Mostarians are already preparing to see their city’s emblem resurrected. More
precisely, the party begins on September 15, 2004 at 5 p.m., a date chosen in the
midst of the war by Mostarian architects whose life work is now dedicated to rebuilding
their town.
The Mostar brigde
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In the former Yugoslavia,
the destruction of cultural heritage erased a common identity in cities and fulfilled
an archaic dream in the countryside
 In 1991, in the early days of the Cold War’s
end, Western Europeans were shaken by television images of a downpour of explosives
falling upon the sleepy little Danube town of Vukovar, and plumes of smoke snaking
their way over Dubrovnik, “the jewel of the Adriatic” and a World Heritage site.
From 1991 to 1999, countries of the former Yugoslavia were subjected to war. While
moderate commentators referred to a campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” those targeted
by the violence spoke of “genocide.” It is precisely on this count and for crimes
against humanity that generals and politicians are being prosecuted by the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Other terms emerged during these wars: “urbicide” to describe the bombing of cities
such as Mostar and Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and “cultural cleansing” or
“cultural genocide” to indicate the fate of mosques, churches, museums, archives,
libraries, schools, and so on. Inevitably, these terms were part of a propaganda
war, but all too often, they reflected the new landscapes of Croatia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, and more recently, of Kosovo.
The deliberate destruction in wartime of cultural heritage is no historical novelty.
Sometimes destruction has been an affair of pillaging for profit, at others it has
been part of the widely recognized right to annihilate the enemy. During World War
I, churches and old town centres were reduced to rubble out of military necessity.
During World War II, large German urban centres disappeared as part of strategic
“area bombing” by Commonwealth airforces.
But there are other reasons. The physical genocide of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis
was accompanied by a cultural genocide—the destruction of synagogues, cemeteries
and other landmarks and treasures.
In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the heritage sites destroyed for purely military
reasons were few and far between. History reminds us that sacral buildings have been
destroyed time and time again in the Balkans. The longstanding belief that the Ottoman
armies, in the 15th century, were gentle with Christian heritage might well be a
myth. Later, in the 19th century, the conquering Hapsburg armies and Catholic administrators
in Croatia turned a handful of mosques into churches and destroyed the rest. More
recently, during World War II, massive destruction of Serbian Orthodox churches was
carried out in Croatia and parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the fascist Ustasha
forces. Ruins in Eastern Slavonia and Krajina, prominently Serb areas of Croatia,
stand as tangible reminders of this period.
But the more recent events are of a singularly different nature. We are not referring
to foreign powers invading a territory and sweeping aside everything in their wake.
We are in the presence of old societies which were to some extent integrated, but
in the process of breaking up. The Serbian inhabitants of Croatian Krajina were not
newcomers to the region in 1991. Croats, Muslims and Serbs have lived together in
Bosnia and Herzegovina since the 16th century. And more recently, in the 20th century,
mixed marriages in cities and towns played a significant role in weaving the social
fabric. In the countryside, where people often settled by ethnic belonging, the situation
was different. Accordingly, during the war, when Muslims, Croats, Serbs or Kosovar
Albanians were chased out of their villages while their mosques and churches were
mined or burned, it was the “other”—“the foreigner”—who was being removed from the
region. The public dream of the nationalists (and sometimes the unavowed secret dream
of the villagers) was thus fulfilled: to be finally at peace, alone among our own
people. The mythical pure rural world was created.
In the cities and towns of Bosnia and Herzegovina, destruction had a different significance.
It was common to hear in Sarajevo and Mostar that synagogues, Christian churches
and mosques are only 100 metres from each other. This may not in fact be true, but
in people’s minds, it was. The cities enjoyed great religious foundations and were
home to the finest Ottoman sacral heritage. A sense of integration had developed
through a common attachment to places and shared spaces. The coexistence of religious
traditions provided people with a common sense of ownership of sacral heritage. Serbs,
Muslims and Croats also took equal pride in their secular buildings, such as the
Sarajevo National and University Library.
“Ethnicized”
heritage
All this was profoundly
changed by war. Although we perceive destruction as barbaric, it is seen as an act
of creation in the eyes of its perpetrators. In the countryside of Croatia and Bosnia
and Herzegovina, it was the creation—or the liberation—of a mythical rural society,
with the symbols of the unwanted other—his minarets or church steeples—eliminated
from the horizon. But in the cities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a common civic identity
was destroyed, and along with it, the “other” inside the people. Secular and sacral
heritage became ethnicized: before the war, nobody in Mostar would have said that
the Old Bridge was a “Muslim” monument. Its destruction by Croat tanks turned it
into one. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the impoverishment of the post-war cities is
appalling, not simply because they are largely emptied of another ethnic group or
of great sacral buildings. The surviving buildings, even intact, are simply ghosts
from another age: the “other” has been eliminated at all levels, inside people and
outside on the streets.
In this context, the restoration and rebuilding of cultural heritage can take on
political and downright divisive dimensions: it is no longer a question of rebuilding
what was held in common, but only “what was ours.” The technical problems of reconstruction
are infinitely less important than the “de-ethnicization” of heritage, and it is
difficult to imagine how the Balkan societies will be able to overcome this problem.
The only hope of restoring a once commonly held landscape lies in a commitment to
do so by the ethnic or national group that carried out the crimes.
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