Stari Most Bosnia and Herzegovina

Legendary

When this bridge was completed in 1566, it was the widest man-made arch in the world.

Photo by Dennis Jarvis

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Legend says the architect fled the city on the day his bridge was finished. Mimar Hayruddin had spent nine years building a single stone arch with nothing holding it up from below, and he was certain that when the wooden scaffolding came out, the whole thing would fall into the river.

It didn't. It stood for 427 years.

Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent ordered the bridge in 1557. The old crossing was made of wood and hung on chains, and one Ottoman writer said it swayed so much that people crossed it in mortal fear.

Hayruddin was a student of Mimar Sinan, the most famous architect in the Ottoman Empire. He designed a single arch of local limestone, held together with iron clamps sealed in lead.

The bridge was said to have cost 300,000 drams, which were silver coins. It was finished in 1566.

It spans about 30 meters and rises roughly 20 meters above the green water of the Neretva River. A 17th-century traveler wrote that it looked like a rainbow arch soaring up to the skies.

The city grew up around it. The name Mostar comes from the word for the bridge keepers who guarded and maintained the crossing.

For centuries the bridge connected two sides of a city where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side. It survived Ottoman rule, Austro-Hungarian rule, two world wars, and communist Yugoslavia.

Then came the Bosnian War. On November 9, 1993, artillery shelling brought the bridge down into the river.

It had no military value. Its destruction was condemned around the world.

Rebuilding began in 2001, led by UNESCO and paid for by several countries. Workers used limestone from the same quarry, the same Ottoman building methods, and where possible the original stones pulled out of the riverbed.

The new bridge opened on July 23, 2004. UNESCO named the area a World Heritage Site the following year.

Walk across the arch, but watch your step, since the stones are polished smooth and studded with ridges for grip. Visit the museum in the Tara tower at the southwest end, where three floors cover the original construction, the destruction, and the rebuild. In summer, watch the local divers who leap from the bridge into the river below, a tradition going back centuries.