Over Troubled Water: The Fall And Rise Of Mostar's Bridge

This August 1993 image is one of the last photos made of the original Mostar Bridge, known locally as Stari Most. Despite being draped in tires and roofed with wooden planks to catch mortar and tank fire, the bridge tumbled into the Neretva River after a barrage of strikes from ethnic Croatian forces in November 1993.  

Mostar photographed in the late 1800s. The town’s iconic bridge is partly visible in the center-left of the image.

Stari Most was completed in 1566 by order of the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman I, whose architect used blocks of limestone cut from a local quarry.

Stari Most in 1910

The bridge was not the largest of its kind at the time of construction, but its slender design and tall arch became an icon of Ottoman architecture. One 17th-century traveler wrote: "I have never seen such a tall bridge. It is thrown from rock to rock as high as the sky."
 

A Serbian soldier is photographed near the Mostar Bridge in June 1992.

The bridge survived the first phase of the 1992-95 Bosnian War as ethnic Serbs fought Bosnian Muslim and Croatian militias for control of Mostar. But when Muslim Bosniak and Croatian allies turned on each other, the bridge became a strategic and symbolic target for Croats who viewed the bridge as a symbol of Islamic conquest.
 

Bosnian Croat fighters in a building in Mostar in August 1993

On November 8, 1993 the Mostar Bridge was hit with around 50 shells from a tank as Croatian soldiers cheered its destruction from a hilltop position.

A still frame from a video shows the moment the bridge began to collapse after being hit by a shell on the morning of November 9, 1993.

At 10:16 a.m. on November 9, Eldin Palata, a 17-year-old Mostar resident was videotaping as the bridge was struck by a shell that sent the structure tumbling into the Neretva River.
 

The remains of the bridge photographed soon after its destruction.

Palata later recalled filming the surreal moment of the bridge’s collapse. "When you're looking through the viewfinder of the camera, everything is in black and white," he told a journalist. "It feels like a dream and you think, 'If I move my eye away from the camera the bridge will still be standing there.'"
 

Residents walk across a temporary footbridge above the Neretva River in March 1994.  

In the years after the war, various nerve-jangling footbridges were pulled across the river in place of the destroyed old bridge.  

This footbridge was destroyed by flooding in December 1999.

Calls for rebuilding the iconic stone bridge using the same materials as the original were led by Mostar architect Amir Pasic. In 1993, Pasic, who was living abroad at the time, began handing out "invitations" to the bridge’s reopening in 2004 -- 11 years into the future. He later recalled people "were laughing" at the distant and ambitious goal as the Bosnian War was still ongoing.

Stones are laid across the arch of the bridge's replacement in August 2003.

By 1998, the project to restore the bridge and its surroundings was officially launched with funding from Croatia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.
 

Engineers lower a keystone into place during reconstruction of the Mostar Bridge in August 2003.

UNESCO provided technical oversight of the rebuilding project, which used stone from the same local quarry that Ottoman builders chose more than 400 years earlier. The limestone is white when freshly cut, but fades to grey over time.  
 

The newly rebuilt bridge is seen in July 2004.

In July 2004 -- the year Amir Pasic had aimed for 11 years before -- the bridge was officially reopened. The reconstruction project cost around $15.5m.

A young Mostar local leaps from the rebuilt bridge while holding flares on the reopening ceremony on July 23, 2004.

After years of lobbying to get the bridge rebuilt, Pasic said he felt "very emotional and very tired" during the 2004 reopening. "In the middle of the ceremony, when everything was going well, I could relax. At that moment, I was free," he said.