Stari Most

A crossing stood on this stretch of the Neretva long before the stone bridge did. Bridge and settlement first appear together in a letter from a citizen of Dubrovnik to his city's council, reporting that Vladislav Hercegović, son of Herceg Stjepan, had turned against his father and seized from him Blagaj, two towers and a bridge on the Neretva. When the Ottomans took the district in 1466 the small town at the crossing grew larger and more important. The date of that first bridge is not known, only that it lasted until the reign of Mehmed II in the fifteenth century, when a new one replaced it, and the replacement was poorly built as well.

The later crossing was a wooden deck hung on chains, described in Ottoman travel writing as worn and unsteady, swaying so much that those who used it crossed in mortal fear. Mostar's economic and administrative importance grew under Ottoman rule, and the wooden crossing needed replacing. The townspeople asked Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent for a new bridge in stone. The commission was issued in 1557 and given to Mimar Hayruddin, an Istanbul architect trained as a student and apprentice of Mimar Sinan, builder of many of the sultan's principal works in the capital and across the empire.

Work began on 24 October 1557. The bridge took 456 blocks of stone and 300,000 silver coins, and the stone was tenelija, a fine-grained limestone thought to have come from a quarry some five kilometres south of the town. The masons and carpenters were drawn largely from the country around Dubrovnik and from the kadiluk of Popovo, districts known for both trades. On the ground the work was directed by Mehmed Karađoz-beg, the local endower who paid for Mostar's principal mosque complex and who is also described as a son-in-law of Suleiman.

Hayruddin himself is a shadow in the record. By one account he fled Mostar the day before the scaffolding went up, in fear of a sultan who had threatened him with death should the arch ever collapse; by another he prepared for his own funeral on the day the scaffolding was struck from the finished structure. There is no evidence that he ever saw his bridge. Little else of the building survives: the mortar is thought to have been mixed with egg white, and what has come down in writing is memory, legend and the builder's name. According to the inscription the bridge was completed in 974 AH, a year running from 19 July 1566 to 7 July 1567, nine years after the first stone was laid. On completion it was the widest human-made arch in the world.

Mostar takes its name from the mostari, the bridge keepers who guarded the crossing through the Ottoman centuries, and the two fortified towers at either end carry that name between them: Halebija to the north-east, Tara to the south-west. The seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi wrote that the arch “is like a rainbow arch soaring up to the skies, extending from one cliff to the other”, and that in sixteen countries he had never seen such a high bridge. Through the centuries the crossing was known by turns as the New Bridge, Sultan Suleiman's Bridge, the Great Bridge and, at the last, the Old Bridge.

The bridge was partly damaged during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina of 1992 to 1995 by the Yugoslav People's Army and the Army of Republika Srpska. In the Croat-Bosniak War the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina used the Old Bridge as a military supply line. On 8 November 1993 the Croatian Defence Council began firing dozens of projectiles into the arch and the towers, and the bridge collapsed the next day under shelling by Bosnian Croat forces, part of a campaign of shelling and intimidation directed at Mostar. Slobodan Praljak, the HVO commander later convicted as a war criminal, had ordered its destruction. Newspapers in Sarajevo reported that more than sixty shells struck the bridge before it fell.

In 2017 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia held that the bridge had been a legitimate military target, on the ground that the opposing Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina had used it for military purposes. The historians Holm Sundhaussen and Marie-Janine Čalić attribute the collapse to shelling by the HVO or by the Croatian Army, and the tribunal's judgment in Prlić and others (IT-04-74) took a comparable view of the responsibility of Croatian units. Other scholars have assessed that the bridge carried little military significance and that the shelling of the old town centre amounted to deliberate destruction of cultural heritage, the Old Bridge above all, which stood for the connection between different communities. András Riedlmayer described the demolition as an act of “killing memory”, or memoricide, in which shared cultural heritage was destroyed on purpose.

Praljak himself published a document, “How the Old Bridge Was Destroyed”, arguing that an explosive charge or mine had been placed beneath the centre of the bridge and detonated remotely in addition to the shelling; most historians dismiss the claim. In 2004 he told Slobodna Dalmacija: “The Old Bridge was a military object, and a military object in war, regardless of its historical and cultural value, can be destroyed.” Croatian media carried claims that units of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina had brought the bridge down, drawing chiefly on material Praljak published on his personal website, together with conspiracy theories that Bosniak units destroyed it in order to blame the Croats. On 6 April 2023 footage recorded from Mount Hum was released, following the trajectories of more than fifty projectiles fired by a Croatian Defence Council tank, with voices identified as HVO soldiers cheering and shouting profanities as the shells struck.

A temporary crossing on the line of the Old Bridge opened on 30 December 1993, built in three days by Spanish military engineers serving with the United Nations Protection Force; it was upgraded three times, ending as a cable-stayed bridge that held the two banks together until the proper reconstruction. After the war the World Bank, UNESCO, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the World Monuments Fund formed a coalition to oversee the rebuilding of the Stari Most and the historic centre of Mostar, with further funding from Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Croatia, the Council of Europe Development Bank and the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In October 1998 UNESCO established an international committee of experts to supervise design and construction, and the decision was taken to build a bridge as close to the original as possible, in the same materials and by the same technology.

The work ran in two phases. Hungarian army engineers lifted the submerged masonry from the riverbed for reuse, although most of the stone their divers recovered proved too damaged to serve; Spanish army engineers then removed the temporary bridge, and a partnership of civil engineering companies led by the Turkish firm Er-Bu rebuilt the arch by Ottoman construction techniques in tenelija limestone from local quarries. Reconstruction began on 7 June 2001 and the rebuilt bridge was inaugurated on 23 July 2004, at an estimated cost of 15.5 million US dollars.

Leaping from the bridge into the cold Neretva has long been a test for the town's young men, and a formal competition has been held each summer since 1968; Enej Kelecija was the first to jump after the reopening, and since 2015 the bridge has been a stop on the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series. It has been listed among the National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina since August 2004, and in July 2005 it was added to UNESCO's list of world cultural heritage.