A few steps away from The Bulevar, the main drag in the city of Mostar in southern Bosnia, the cemetery across from the 16th century Karadjoz Bey Mosque offers a quiet, shady spot away from the crowds.
I’ve always liked wandering around cemeteries—from damp English country churchyards to overgrown family burial grounds in the West Virginia hills to the ancestral stone tombs of Madagascar’s central highlands. Unless you are looking for someone famous or a long-forgotten family member, most names on the headstones do not mean much. Yet you can’t help thinking about the origins of their names, why these people settled in this place, their occupations, their families, why they lived so long or died so young.
Almost every cemetery has graves from several generations and centuries—in the US, the weathered headstones of Civil War veterans side by side with those from World War II and Vietnam, sometimes several generations clustered together in a family plot.
The Mostar cemetery is unlike any I have ever seen because almost everyone died within a few months in a single year. Some were elderly, some middle-aged, some in their twenties and thirties, and some in their teens. Line after line of headstones, some marking the month of death as May or June of 1993.
From the late Middle Ages, Mostar was a market town on the trade route between the mineral-rich mountain regions of central Bosnia and the Adriatic coast. It was named for the mostari, the bridge-keepers who guarded the rickety wooden bridge (most) that crossed the gorge of the Neretva River. In 1566, the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent ordered the construction of a stone bridge, 92 feet long and 66 feet high, that became a wonder in its own time. One 17th century traveller wrote:
The bridge is like a rainbow arch soaring up to the skies, extending from one cliff to another … I, a poor and miserable slave of Allah, have passed through 16 countries, but I have never seen such a high bridge.
The Stari Most (Old Bridge), as it came to be known, became the symbol of a multi-ethnic city. It linked the east bank of the Neretva, with its bazaars and twisting alleys, dotted with mosque minarets, with the west bank. In the 19th century, under the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian Empires, the river plain to the west was laid out with tree-lined boulevards, stately mansions, and ornately decorated public buildings. After World War II, the communist regime of Marshal Tito built factories to produce textiles, plastics, aluminum, wine and tobacco, and erected blocks of Soviet-style prefabricated concrete apartment blocks to house the growing population.
The east bank was inhabited mostly by Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), the west by Croats and Serbs. All were ethnic Slavs, separated only by religion, with most Croats Catholics and most Serbs Orthodox. As long as Yugoslavia—the union of the Slavs—held together, conflicts were rare. In 1991, Mostar had a population of 127,000; Bosniaks and Croats each made up about one third, with about one in five identifying as Serbs.
The unity, and later the bridge that represented it, came tumbling down in April 1992 after Bosnia and Herzegovina, following the lead of Slovenia and Croatia, but without the support of its Serb minority, declared independence from Yugoslavia. The Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army occupied the east bank, forcing Bosniaks and Croats to flee. Serb artillery destroyed public buildings, Catholic churches and mosques, and several bridges. Wandering around the city today, almost 30 years later, you still pass the shells of burned-out buildings. Remarkably, the Stari Most still stood, providing a vital link between east and west banks.
Behind the scenes, Serb and Croat leaders were negotiating to divide Bosnia, and agreed Croatia would claim Mostar. After the Serb forces retreated, residents returned to the east bank to rebuild their homes and mosques. Unity between Croats and Bosniaks proved temporary and illusory. A year later, Croat forces swept through the city, forcibly removing Bosniaks to the east bank and sending men to concentration camps. From a mountain top, today marked ironically by a huge white cross, Croat artillery pounded the east bank. Snipers picked off people venturing out of their homes in search of food.
According to their faith, Muslims wash and bury a body soon after death. Because existing cemeteries were exposed, east bank residents used the city park opposite the Karadjoz Bey mosque as an emergency burial ground. Although the trees provided cover from snipers, many burials, both of soldiers and civilians, took place after dark.
Croat artillery began shelling the Stari Most in November 1993. There was a strategic objective—to isolate a Bosniak-controlled strip on the west bank, forcing soldiers to move across the river and cutting off the area from food supplies. The attack also had a symbolic significance—the bridge, built by the Ottomans, represented the city’s Muslim legacy.
The Croat-Bosniak conflict ended in 1994, and the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina formalized in the 1995 Dayton Agreement. The city pledged to rebuild the Stari Most authentically. Stone blocks were cut from the original quarry and hand carved; workers perching on wooden scaffolding fastened them together with iron hooks cast in lead. Today, the bridge is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the most-visited tourist site in Mostar.
Walking along the pedestrianized Bulevar, with its shops, bars, restaurants, hotels, and stalls selling tourist kitsch, it’s easy to forget that this street was once the front line in the war, and anyone crossing it in daylight risked being cut down by a sniper’s bullet. Close to the cemetery, the Museum of War and Genocide Victims features individual testimonies (translated into English) from victims. Many are linked to an artefact—a diary, a letter, clothing, a common household item—that belonged to the victim.
At the home of a prosperous Ottoman merchant family, now a small museum, the guide, a Bosniak in her late twenties, gave us the tour, then talked about her family’s experiences in 1993. “It was a miracle we survived. Food was scarce. My mother was pregnant with me and my twin sister, but sometimes all she had to eat was grass. The experience changed my father forever. He is moody, maybe it’s PTSD, I don’t know.”
I asked if her generation, which had not experienced the war, felt differently about other ethnic groups. “There was this boy I really liked, a Serb. He liked me too, but told me ‘I’m sorry but this can’t work—you’re a Muslim, I’m Orthodox.’”
She apologized for crying. “I usually don’t get like this,” she said. I said I understood, although in my heart I knew I could never really understand what happened in Mostar in 1993.