Overview of bridges
"There is nothing in my eyes better or more precious than bridges. They serve no purpose that is secret or malignant." Ivo Andrić wrote this in 1933, twelve years before he published The Bridge over the Drina, a masterpiece of Yugoslav literature published in 1945. Alas, history has since proven the great writer from Trvanik wrong. In eastern Bosnia, the venerable Mehmed-Pasha-Sokolović Bridge in Višegrad, which so inspired Ivo Andrić, was the site of one of the worst massacres of Bosnian civilians during the Bosnian-Herzegovinian war (1992-1995): men, women, children and old people had their throats slit on this old Ottoman bridge and their bodies thrown into the Drina River in the summer of 1992. If, since then, the Višegrad bridge has been listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site, nothing on the spot reminds us of this "secret" and "malignant" page of the country's history. Other time, other place. We are in Mostar in 1664. The great Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi writes in his chronicles: "I have traveled the world for twenty-seven years and never have I encountered such a magnificent and unique bridge among the thousands of architectural works I have seen." This is the same feeling that still embraces tourists coming to admire the Stari Most, the Old Bridge of Mostar. This majestic arch, which has spanned the Neretva since 1566, is the most famous monument in the former Yugoslavia. Here, like Evliya Çelebi, one still witnesses, almost five centuries later, the superb and frightening spectacle of the mostari, "the brave children of this city [who] jump into the cold water of the Neretva" as they leap from the Old Bridge. But this last one comes back from far. The bridge was destroyed by Bosnian-Croat forces during the last war. It was the last bridge in Mostar to fall on November 9, 1993. The filmed images of this "crime" (a term used by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) were shown around the world. The emotion was such that UNESCO launched the reconstruction the following year, even before the end of the war. But it took ten years of effort and complicated calculations to find the (almost) identical shape of the original arch designed by the Ottoman architects. Listed as a world heritage site since 2005, the "new Old Bridge" has unfortunately since become the symbol of the separation between Catholics and Muslims in the most touristic, but also the most divided city in the country.
The bridge of the Sarajevo bombing
The history of bridges in Bosnia and Herzegovina is definitely not a long quiet river. It inevitably passes through the Latin bridge that spans the Miljacka in Sarajevo. This time it is June 28, 1914. It was precisely 10:50 on that Sunday morning when Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in front of this other Ottoman bridge. This was the event that triggered the First World War. As surprising as it may seem, the Latin Bridge was renamed for seventy years in honor of the author of the Sarajevo bombing. For the Yugoslav authorities (royal, then socialist), Gavrilo Princip had by his fatal act sought above all to free Bosnia-Herzegovina from Austro-Hungarian control and to unite the Slavs of the Balkans. "In any case, the Germans would have found another pretext to enter the war," Gavrilo Princip declared shortly before dying of illness in his Czech prison in 1918. It was not until 1992 and the declaration of independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina that the Latin Bridge was given its original name, inherited from the seventeenth century, when it served the main Catholic district of the current capital.
But 1992 also marked the beginning of the terrible siege of Sarajevo, the longest in modern history: 1,425 days, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996. If the bridges of Sarajevo were relatively spared by the bombardments of the Bosnian-Serbian army, they were the witnesses of shocking scenes. One of them in particular was the scene of three significant events: the Vrbanja bridge. This 1974 concrete structure was first the site of the first victims of the siege, Suada Dilberović and Olga Sučić, two young women who were mowed down by Bosnian Serb gunmen while demonstrating for peace on 5 April 1992. A year later, on May 19, 1993, it was also here that a couple attempting to cross the bridge fell to Bosnian-Serb snipers: the Bosnian Admira Ismić and the Bosnian-Serb Boško Brkić. Their deaths, filmed by a television crew, inspired a documentary and a play called Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo. Finally, French peacekeepers fought the "Vrbanja Bridge Battle" on 27 May 1995, the day after a UN checkpoint was captured by Bosnian Serb forces. This bayonet and hand-to-hand assault resulted in the death of two French soldiers and four enemy militiamen. It also marked the beginning of a more muscular Western reaction to the Serbian forces, which led to the end of the war with the Dayton Agreement on December 14, 1995.
Bridges and films
After the official peace, it took another two and a half months for the siege of Sarajevo to be lifted in February 1996. But already, the martyred city had become a source of inspiration for artists from around the world, from the rock band U2 to the Yugoslav-born French cartoonist Enki Bilal. As early as 1993, Jean-Luc Godard shot the short film Hail, Sarajevo. Twenty-one years later, in 2014, the Swiss filmmaker will participate with twelve other directors in the film The Bridges of Sarajevo, a feature-length poetic film dedicated to the city where, according to a historian's formula, the twentieth century began (with the assassination of June 28, 1914) and where it ended (with the siege of 1992-1996). The first years of peace that followed were marked by a strong international military presence. Throughout the country, Nato soldiers rebuilt bridges or installed temporary structures, such as the iron bridge at Martin Brod, in the Una National Park, which has been "temporary" since 1997. But heavy machinery and armor also cause damage. The small stone bridge at Stari Majdan, near Sanski Most, has been used so many times by vehicles of the Canadian Nato contingent that it is now impassable by cars. The town of Sanski Most itself owes its name to an old Ottoman bridge that crossed the Sana River. But it disappeared during the Second World War. For in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this conflict was even more destructive and deadly than the last war. In 1945, to escape the advance of Tito's partisans, German forces and their allies blew up many historic structures, such as the Arslanagić Bridge in Trebinje (16th century) and the Old Bridge in Konjic (17th century). Both have since been rebuilt. Others have been replaced by modern concrete buildings. But in Jablanica, a destroyed bridge has been voluntarily preserved as it is, with its metal structure still collapsed on the right bank of the Neretva. It marks the memory of one of the biggest battles fought here by the Yugoslav partisans in August 1943. It should be noted, however, that the collapsed bridge that can be seen today is not the original. It is a replica that was built and blown up for the most expensive film ever made in Yugoslavia, The Battle of the Neretva (1969), with Yul Brynner and Orson Welles in the lead roles. It was an explosive shot for nothing. Because the shots were considered so bad that the most intense scene of the film had to be reconstructed in the studio... with a miniature bridge. This is also the saga of the bridges of Bosnia-Herzegovina: funny and grating stories that the inhabitants of the country cultivate with delight.
It is "bridge" to laugh sometimes
Among the good Bosnian bridge jokes, we will remember the one about the "bridge of obstinacy" (Inat Ćuprija) in Stolac. This strange little stone structure of the sixteenth or seventeenth century owes its name to the legend that the client and the craftsman in charge of construction would have been angry during the construction. Vexed by the customer who did not find the work symmetrical enough, the craftsman would have persisted, by bravado, to make this one as asymmetrical as possible. So much so that we now find ourselves with a bridge supported by five arches, almost all of different widths.
On the side of black humor, we must mention this accomplice of Gravilo Princip who, on the day of the Sarajevo bombing, tried to commit suicide to escape the crowd by swallowing a cyanide capsule and throwing himself off the Ćumurija bridge (downstream of the Latin bridge). But the cyanide only caused him to vomit and he ended up in the Miljacka, which was only 13 cm high at the time.
European taxpayers can laugh (yellow) at the mention of the Pelješac road bridge. It is the bridge that has most marked the recent history of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But it is in Croatia. This 2.4 km long structure was designed in 2007 to bypass the only Bosnian city on the Adriatic coast, Neum, which cuts Croatia in two at Dalmatia. Due to a legal dispute between the two countries, technical problems, but also massive misappropriation of money, the construction site was delayed for 15 years and saw its cost explode to at least 420 million euros in the end (+50% compared to the initial budget). Largely financed by the European Union, it was finally opened to traffic in 2022. This very expensive, but nonetheless superb cable-stayed bridge makes it possible to drive along the Croatian coast without having to pass through the Neum border crossing. But it also now closes the last little bit of Bosnia and Herzegovina's maritime horizon.
