War. If you think you can see a clear cause, a clear result, and a clear set of engagement rules, then you are wearing one side’s blinders or the other side’s. In 2003, there was a documentary released called, The Fog of War, in which former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara is engaged in a discussion about the nature of warfare and the lessons to be learned. For most of us in the USA, war is a pretty far away event. We send our young men and women away to a place like the Middle East and they train, they fight, they try to make a difference, and they try to return home again. When you travel to Croatia and the surrounding countries, war is much, much closer.
A few days ago, we were sitting at a wine bar in old town Dubrovnik, chatting about the 1990’s Croatian War tour that Lisa had just been on. Lisa noticed that the table behind us would sometimes be talking and sometimes be listening to us. As they were leaving, the wife, now a doctor, engaged us. She told us that her current husband, the man sitting across from her, was holding Russian Kalashnikov machine gun and defending this very town 23 years ago. She said that when she was a child, one day she came home from school and her mother said to her, ‘”one of us must survive,” so pack a bag and you are joining you father overseas working on his doctorate.’ The wars, the conflicts, the insurgencies in the countries that formerly made up Yugoslavian went on from 1991 to 2001. The Croatian War of Independence, the Homeland War as some call it, ended in 1995.
Bosnia and Herzegovina for a B-Day celebration? WTF? Not something we would have envisioned but anything goes on this trip. We decided to drive a few hours across the border to Bosnia and see the Kravica waterfalls and the famous old bridge in Mostar. About 1 hour out of Dubrovnik on the coastal road we saw a ton of seafood farms with mussels, oysters, clams, and shellfish. And shortly afterwards, ran into bumper to bumper traffic. At first we thought it was a bad accident but soon learned that it is a 6 km section of land that is still owned by Bosnia which requires you to go thru passport control TWICE and was total nightmare on this Saturday. This stretch of land, which allows Bosnia access to the Adriatic Sea, happened during the Ottoman empire when Croatians wanted to protect themselves from the Venetians who controlled the upper portion of Croatia. They knew the Venetians would never enter their #1 enemy’s territory. Once in Bosnia and Herzegovina we followed the Neretva River which travels all the way down into Croatia and into the sea. Due to the border crossing(s), our trip took an extra two hours. It was not fun.
We finally arrived at Kravica Falls and the weather turned stormy so we didn’t get to swim, but the people watching was great as we shared a frosty local beer. The Falls were beautiful.
The weather soon cleared and we arrived in Mostar which is a lovely town along the Neretva River. The famous old bridge (called the Stari Most) was built in 1557 by the Ottomans. At the time, it was the longest single span stone arch in the world. If you were alive in the early 90’s the last time you probably saw this bridge was in the news. The culture is a mix of Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslim Bosniaks that lived happily together until the early 90’s when war broke about between these 3 groups and the famous old bridge crumbled into the river.
The city of Mostar is still rebuilding, but the bridge, which symbolized the unity of this city’s diverse faith and culture, was completely restored stone by stone using the same techniques used over 450 years ago. The project was overseen by UNESCO and cost over $13 million. It actually took longer to rebuild the bridge in the 21st century than it did in the 16th century! Today, divers periodically jump from the bridge, 75 ft down into the Neretva river, for the sake of tradition and to impress girls or if they collect $35 EUR.
Our hotel http://hotel-mostar.ba/ba/home, Kriva Cuprija was just a few meters from the Bridge and surrounded by mosque minarets and church steeples so we got to hear both bells and the Call to Prayer.
Hotels and food are much cheaper than in Croatia and everyone is super friendly and happy to welcome tourists back to this city. Their meats are grilled or cooked in ashes and we sampled beef, veal, veal liver, chicken, and local sausage. The streets are cobble stone and the roofs are made of heavy limestone shingles.
Franciscan Church of Sts. Peter and Paul has the tallest spire in the town and was built after the war in 1997. The bell tower looks more like a mosque than a Catholic church.
Speaking of war, we are still trying to understand how & why this happened during our lifetime. So imagine the internal conflicts we watched on the Brady Bunch between brothers and sisters being spread out over a couple of thousands years. Things are going to eventually get pretty nasty. Like many wars in the past, this war was all about power & religion. Two major things happened a long, long time ago that impacted current history:
- The Roman Empire was split in the 4th century which divided the Balkans down the middle into Catholic (west side) and Byzantine Orthodox (east side) along today’s Bosnian-Serbian border.
- The Islamic Ottomans invaded the area in the 14th century in Bosnia & Serbia which created another geographical split in the Balkans- Christians in the North and Muslims in the South.
Its actually a lot more complicated than this, so after some wrong doings in WWI and WWII, a political war hero nicknamed ‘Tito’ emerged to unite Yugoslavia creating 6 republics: Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro and Macedonia and all was well.
- Tito was a good politician and not only did he unite Yugoslavia but he also played the East (Moscow) against the West (US) often stating ‘If you don’t pay me off, I’ll let the other guy build a base here.” The US paid him 2 billion- not sure how much Russia paid.
- When Tito died in 1980, Yugoslavia’s 6 republics began to fall apart over the next decade. On June 25, 1991 both Croatia and Slovenia declared its independence from Yugoslavia and a bloody war began. Bosnia decided to break away as well.
- The Serbs starting bombing the old town of Dubrovnik on Dec. 6, 1991, the Croatians bombed the Mostar bridge in 1993 (video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM3B-6CFo9k )and some shocking ethnic cleansing & rapes began in Bosnia by the Serbs.
- Finally in the summer of 1995, the UN and NATO, led by President Clinton and the USA, sans Russia and China support, took on a leadership role to end the war in Bosnia with bombing the aggressors and later a peace agreement was signed in Dayton, Ohio. In 1999, NATO again militarily stepped into the area during the Kosovo War.
Enough about war and such- we are on our pilgrimage tour. Next stop is the Catholic pilgrimage town of Medugorje.
