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War broke the Mostar bridge, one of the most emblematic buildings in the Balkans. Now, it has been triumphantly restored

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2004 by Peter Davey

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At the end of the Croat-Muslim hostilities, warlords started piecemeal reconstruction but the AKTC and the WMF, working with a deeply committed mayor, managed to suppress (and usually obliterate) the resulting pustules of PoMo. Many vernacular buildings have been converted into guesthouses by carefully rebuilding destroyed elements, usually with freestone ground floors and timber-framed upper parts, all topped by shallow-pitched roofs covered in large and thick irregular limestone slates. Pavings are of rounded stones taken from the river bed. At the moment, much is new, and the atmosphere is a bit Disneyfied. But there is no faking or plastic (except for unwise varnish on wood here and there). The buildings, like the bridge, will weather and change over time and gradually acquire the patina of use and common history.

While much of the vernacular matrix may be rescued, many of the biggest buildings are still in ruins, or at best (like the 1960s national theatre) scarred by the acne of shrapnel and heavy machine gun bullets. Along Marsal Tito Street (the main north-south thoroughfare in the east side of the town), large Habsburg commercial buildings like the Secessionist Landsbank by Josip Vancas and municipal ones like the girls' high school are stone shells overgrown with sumac bushes, pink, rose and cerise hollyhocks, snapdragons and orange jasmine. The Stari grad Agency is searching for development partners for many such buildings, and has evolved a scheme by Boris Podrecca for turning the ruins of the girls' school into a mixed-use complex, including shops, offices, a restaurant and a hotel. Money is still being sought.

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Over on the other side of the town, an even bigger high school has been renovated and, for the first time, Croats and Muslims are being educated in the same building, admittedly on different floors, but there is hope that the school and similar experiments will gradually help weave the communities together. The Stari grad Agency has three new major projects on the stocks, symbolically, one for each of the religious groups: they include the Orthodox (Serb) Metropolitan's Palace, the nineteenth-century Baroque shell of which now stares sightlessly over the valley. When the palace gets its windows back, will it look down on the kind of tolerant city of diverse communities that flourished under the Ottomans and the Habsburgs? Architecture has done almost everything in its power to try to help it do so.

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1 Brave not only because of their leap from the apex of the bridge, but because the drains of the old quarters empty directly into the torrent. A scheme for resewering the town is designed and is supported by the World Bank, but it is waiting for final agreement between the communities.

2 Full details are given in Conservation and Revitalization of Historic Mostar, The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Geneva, 2004 (www.akdn.org).