Stari Most

Stari Most — literally 'the old bridge' — was built in 1566 on the orders of Suleiman the Magnificent and for 427 years held the record for the widest single-stone arch span in the world, a distinction that speaks to both the ambition and the technical mastery of its Ottoman builders.

The bridge rises in a single parabolic curve from two fortified stone abutments on either bank of the Neretva, and from the water on a calm morning the reflection of the golden-white stone arch makes a perfect oval that doubles the apparent height of the structure in the still green river below.

The two stone towers — the Tara tower on the east bank and the Halebija tower on the west — guard the approaches to the bridge, and their upper levels were used as firing positions during the 1993 conflict; the bridge itself held out for nine days of bombardment before collapsing on November 9, 1993, an event broadcast worldwide.

The reconstruction, completed in 2004, used the same limestone quarried from the same local source (Čanjevci) as the original, and international teams of divers and engineers worked from Ottoman engineering texts, archival drawings and recovered original stones to make the new structure as faithful to the old one as possible, though the reconstruction is acknowledged as a reconstruction rather than an authentic artifact.

The Neretva runs green and fast below the bridge, snowmelt from the high mountains upstream giving it a colour and a force quite different from the slow brown rivers most visitors expect in the Balkans; young men still dive from the bridge into the river in summer, a tradition that dates back at least to the Ottoman period and has become one of the defining images of the city.

On either bank the old town — the Turkish mahala on the east and the Bosnian quarter on the west — is a dense ensemble of white stone houses with red tile roofs, their upper floors cantilevered over the narrow streets in the Ottoman domestic manner, and the whole composition of bridge, towers, river and old town is one of the most reproduced images in Southeast Europe.

The UNESCO inscription recognized the bridge as part of the cultural landscape of the Neretva valley, and while the old town on both banks has been heavily reconstructed since 1995, the effort to maintain the Ottoman urban fabric — stone paving, traditional house forms, the market street running down to the water — gives the town a coherence that many reconstructed historic centres in the region lack.

It is one of the most celebrated Ottoman engineering achievements in the Balkans and held the world record for widest stone arch for over four centuries.

The reconstructed bridge, towers and old town together form one of the most visually complete historic urban ensembles in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The diving tradition from the bridge is a living cultural practice, not a staged tourist performance.