138. Balkan Tour (5)

5. Split to Sarajevo

Stop at the town of Mostar, where Roman Catholics, Orthodox Catholics, and Muslims all went at each other.  Many buildings after seventeen years are still pockmarked with bullet holes (which I couldn't stop taking pictures of).  Too many horrors and ironies to report.    Maybe one detail that sums them up: a cross on a hill behind the famous Mostar bridge.

The bridge was long taken as a symbol of harmony between the Muslims on one side of the Neretva River and the Christians on the other.  In 1993 this bridge, strategically insignificant, was destroyed by the Croats (Roman Catholics), apparently out of spite (the Croat leaders are still, I believe, on trial before the International Criminal Tribunal).  Then, after 70% of the city was destroyed the sides were forced in 1995 to make peace. 

We see this cross on the hill behind the rebuilt bridge of harmony and, before the guide speaks, think there has been some healing.  Then the guide tells us that the cross was put right up by the Catholics to "mark their territory."

We get the idea that everything done here makes a statement.  The rebuilt Franciscan church, with the tallest spire in town, caused us to comment on the energy of the rebuilders everywhere in Mostar.  "Yes, to get their statement made."

Our guide, Dado, was a native of Mostar.  I asked him the big question: "How do you think of yourself?"  "As a Mostarian," he said.  His first  loyalty was to his city.  He said he was thirteen at the time of the war.  Were his parents involved?  Yes, he said, but he clearly didn't want to talk about it — beyond saying that they (and he) were Catholic.

"Do you think there is genuine healing?"  Yes, he said, but it is very slow.  "Maybe it will take two generations."  "More," said Julia, our general guide, when I mentioned his answer to her.

Among the minor bad stuff here there is corruption, which we have heard about in the U.S.   Bribes.  Endemic in the "third world."  Well today at the Bosnian border one of the three officials came to the bus, spoke briefly to Julia and the driver, and walked away with three bottles of beer.  "It costs three bottles of beer to cross into Bosnia," Julia said to us.  "But it's sort of a joke."  Real beer, though.  (At the Croatian border there's a sign that says, "If you have any comments about our agents go to web site such and such.")

We're getting to know our companions better, and there are some interesting ones.  Have lunched with a couple who work for the CIA, both of them, and don't want to say much about it.  And with two sisters who were born into a German family that had come into Serbia with the Austrians 150 years ago but gotten thrown out with the other Germans who had come in with the Nazis.  They were not welcome as refugees in Germany, though, so the family moved to New York where the girls became schoolteachers near Buffalo.  Then there's Tom Dietrich, who described himself in the introductions as "an anti-trust lawyer."  We thought he litigated against trusts but no, he represents the trusts (corporations) against the anti-trusters, the government.  "Who are your clients?" MA asked him. "Anybody willing to pay my exorbitant fees," he said.

Tomorrow we'll do Sarajevo, the place most vivid in our memories of Serb atrocities.  Remember them lobbing mortars into market places and sniping at people in the streets from the hills?  And, oh yes, it's the place where a passionate Slav nationalist triggered World War I by killing the Austrian Archduke.