Ottoman History Podcast - Water from Stone

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

with Jesse Howell & Marijana Mišević hosted by Sam Dolbee | In this special episode of the Ottoman History Podcast, Sam Dolbee and Jesse Howell travel by bike along the Ćiro Trail from Dubrovnik in Croatia to Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they meet fellow Ottoman historian Marijana Mišević. Along the way, they consider the legacy and traces of early modern Ottoman caravan roads across this space, as well as their intersections with the Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav, and more recent past. The episode is about mobility, memory, and the built environment. Also bicycles, friendship, and the journey. « Click for More »

In the 1500s and 1600s, Ottoman caravan routes stretched all across southeastern Europe, from Dubrovnik on the Adriatic to Sofia, Edirne, Istanbul, and beyond. By the late 19th century, the political situation of this region had changed, as had technology. And so, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a railway was built connecting Dubrovnik and the hinterland of Herzegovina all the way to Mostar. Different geographies, different infrastructures, and different empires, both of them gone from the world now. The remains?

Not entirely so. And if you're friends with Jesse Howell, you might find yourself in Dubrovnik in late June getting ready to look for these traces of imperial infrastructures passed not by horse, as the Ottoman caravans would move, and not by train, as happened under the Austro-Hungarians. No, with Jesse, you go by bike, 100 miles over three days from Dubrovnik to Mostar. Jesse's bike arrived disassembled in a box, only lost once by airlines on the way from the U.S. I'm Jesse Howell. I'm a historian of the Ottoman Empire, and my research focus has been on caravan routes and caravan travel in the Ottoman Balkans.

And put air in the tires. Have there been moments of doubt? There have been moments of belief. It's been mostly doubt. Okay. I'm actually going to try to ride around somewhere. Make sure the gears are working. Can you point out, in case any of my family members ever listen to this that I have a helmet? It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. And in this episode, Jesse and I ride the path

known as the Ciro Trail to Mostar, where we meet our friend and fellow Ottoman historian, Mariana Mishevich. where we meet our friend and fellow Ottoman historian, Mariana Misiewicz. Our path follows the former Austro-Hungarian railway, going between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, yes, but also between the early modern Ottoman Empire, the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, Yugoslavia and its painful breakup, in the place of all these phantoms amidst the people and places and rocks and rivers and concrete and canals of the present.

This is water from stone. How is it? It works. Works? It's great. Everything, I can't believe it. Everything is as it should be. It feels great. It's such a huge relief. Now we just got to get you sorted.

As for the bike I would ride, it came from Mostar, thanks to Miran Hasibovic, who drove down to Dubrovnik and met us in a minivan on a busy street. B-I-H license plate? Oh shit. Alright! Hi Miran. How are you? Hi Sam.

Hi Jesse. Hi Jesse. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming. In the wintertime, you might need a big old Yugoslavian blanket to stay warm, but in the summer, well, Miran had some words of caution for us. Morning, and you need to have a great midday, you can end up with vomiting, fever, you know, like, out of heat exhaustion. So I know Herzegovina is famous for being hot in the summers yes but is it even 44 44 44

in most are aware at the kravica waterfalls oh my god so what else i have to tell you yes just remember when you go to the tunnel there will be bats poo on the ground and a lot of bats inside so that's one issue smelly passing through and when you have difficult situation like bridges and stuff just put the bike next to you and go and how many bridges are there I'm not sure I never did it okay I just ran Сколько там bridges? Я не уверен, я никогда не делал. Я просто ездил на велосипеде. Мы расскажем тебе, если мы приедем. Что-нибудь еще нам нужно знать? Нет, просто избавьтесь от солнца.

И пей много воды. Ступидные вещи. Пей, высокую защиту, липстик и много воды. Cream? Yes. High protection? Lipstick? Yes. And a little water. Okay. Dobro. Dobro. Dobro.

It was beautiful meeting you guys. Drive safe. I will. I will. I will. Take good care. Thank you, Mihran. You're coming out here.

No problem. See you. Bye. With Mihran's warnings in mind, we set out early the next morning, wheeling bikes through the old city of Dubrovnik, past delivery trucks, and people on their way to work. It's also maybe a good time to give some more historical context about the road. So in the 1400s, the Ottomans are gradually establishing more and more direct control over almost the entirety of the Balkan peninsula. Around 1430, we have the first documents that show Dubrovnik sending tribute to the Ottoman Sultan, Murad II.

And from that stage further, the Republic of Dubrovnik, or Republic of Raghuza, entered into this tributary state relationship. One of the things that's interesting about Dubrovnik or Ragusa is they had the highest levels of autonomy locally within their really small territory inland, which was completely surrounded by the Ottomans on all sides on the land. They did what they wanted. Their officials were not imposed. In exchange, the Ottomans actually gave the merchants of Dubrovnik very favorable customs rates. They paid less customs than even Muslim merchants. Even Ottoman Muslim merchants paid more than these Dubrovnikers. It was a very pragmatic cohabitation.

Dubrovnik provided a lot of value to the Ottomans. It definitely punched above its weight for such a tiny place. One thing was, during the periods of warfare with Venice, which was the major power in the Adriatic, Ottoman goods, it was mostly exports, could flow through the port of Dubrovnik out into the western Christian Mediterranean, could flow through the port of Dubrovnik out into the western Christian Mediterranean, unobstructed at a high volume. A lot of forest products, pitch, timber, furs, agricultural production, export of grain. The other thing that Dubrovnik had to offer was information.

So Dubrovnik merchants were across the Ottoman Empire, but they were also across the Western Mediterranean as far as the Spanish Empire, across the Italian Peninsula. And that could be deployed when negotiating. If the Ottomans were angry with them for something, they might reveal something that was happening in the Habsburg world or the Venetian world or the kingdom of Spain to sort of underline their value to the Ottomans' geostrategic ambitions. Some of the elements that are really well spelled out in the documents are the emphasis on the Dubrovnik tribute ambassadors. So every year, two nobles would be sent to Istanbul. They'd send them with 10,000 pieces of gold,

and they would engage in currency speculation along the way because of their amazing intelligence gathering. They knew which currencies were more valuable, so they would turn the 10,000 into 12,000 and plus to cover their own expenses. That would be delivered to the sultan. Very little of these pages and pages of documents of information that was given to the ambassadors says anything about the journey, which was very frustrating for me,

because I didn't want to write a diplomatic history. I wanted to write about the road itself, the space in between the poles of Dubrovnik and Istanbul. But it does give you an insight into what the political priorities were and kind of the modus operandi of this very small republic. Which gifts to give to which officials, how many, which specific colors of textiles to give. This is it.

So we just passed through the gate. Go to gate. Adriatic's on our right, the old port, Arsenal. Straight ahead of us is the old Lazaretto. Caravan travelers would arrive in quarantine. To Robinick being quite famous for his strictness. Of its quarantine.

The old Ottoman Han. Is right behind where this very loud street cleaning machine. Very cute. And some of like, some of the cars that are in the back. The old Ottoman Han is right behind where this very loud street cleaning machine is. Very cute and somewhat loud. So this is the appropriate spot for the beginning of our adventure. The journey from Dubrovnik to Istanbul during the early modern period

could be done as fast as two weeks, but generally took about one to three months. Should we start riding up there? Yeah. Ottoman building and infrastructure development, which really boomed in the 16th century, in the 1500s, along the particular axis of this route, made it a very stable and secure way for merchants and diplomats to make their way between the sort of central western Mediterranean and the Ottoman

centers of power. So through the mountains of the western Balkans into the larger cities like Sofia, Plovdiv, Edirne, and eventually Istanbul. The road itself is about 1400 kilometers. One of the many things that I find endlessly fascinating about this road network and its success during the period that I write about is the fact that it is not the easy way to go. If you look on the map, and if you look like the Romans, you would see the Via Egnatia. There's a much easier way. It's quite a bit shorter. There's a great harbor in Durres, Albania. All of this land was controlled by the Ottomans during this entire time period, and yet it's never developed to the same extent that the Ragusa road was. It's not this kind of classical majestic Roman nature defying straight paved angled entity. It's more flexible

than that. So it was built around animal powered caravans and merchants with bulky merchandise that they needed to move. So the route is better understood as almost like a series of stopping places. So the Ottomans built an incredible amount of transportation-specific infrastructure in these stopping places. So most spectacularly and most visibly, we have the bridges. But there are also so many different specific and repeating forms. You have Ottoman mosques, but you also have hans or caravanserais, which are specifically walled enclosures where merchants, their animals, and their goods can safely spend a certain amount of time.

animals and their goods can safely spend a certain amount of time. A lot of these towns, it wasn't just for traders, but it seems that the Ottoman founders of these towns were interested in building settlements that would be stable. So they might also invest through vakif, which is a kind of pious endowment, in schools, in baths, in commercial spaces that could generate revenue. So it was almost like these little Ottoman colonies within Ottoman space built at strategic points. But it wasn't just necessarily a race to get from metropole in the west to metropole in the east. There's a lot of trade activity, diplomatic activity happening in the places in between, and a lot of opportunities for encounter as well. One of the things that's so striking about the caravans is that there is no such thing as a sectarian caravan.

You have multiple faiths, you have multiple sectarian identities. I don't want to give this kind of dreamy world where everyone gets along in this globalized, mutually beneficial economic world, but ultimately, fundamentally, this was based on cooperation between people with what we would consider distinct ethnic sectarian identities today. In 1667, there is a pretty massive and devastating earthquake that really wipes out Dubrovnik. And around that time,

it's the end of the war in Crete with Venice, and relations stay relatively good between Venice and the Ottomans. And at that point, Venice has developed its own overland trade route through the port of Split. So the 1660s are kind of the end of this really privileged really productive relationship between the Ottomans and Dubrovnik and the caravan road you could still travel on it it still existed but it became more of a regional and then kind of local access for trade in a way kind of reverting back to what it had been for many many years before this efflorescence between the Ottomans and Dubrovnik. Few long journeys, past or present, can be discussed without getting caught in the realm of the gastrointestinal. And dear listeners, I'm sorry to report that this is the case for our trip too. The night before leaving Dubrovnik and the Adriatic,

Jesse had muscles. He then spent most of the night throwing up those muscles. We hoped things would be better that morning and optimistically bought a neon orange Fanta. After a steep climb up from the coast and after passing a Catholic church ringing bells for Wednesday morning mass, we learned that the neon orange Fanta would not calm his stomach, and would instead be a small offering to the roadside grass. But we pushed on, made it into Bosnia and Herzegovina. After buying some water, we asked an elderly man which way to the Ciro Trail. He pointed us in the direction of the cute locomotive signs marking the path, and gave us a gracious thumbs up, as if we were midfielders who had played a

ball forward too ambitiously, but he wanted us to know it was a good idea nevertheless. All along the trail are traces of the railway stations, sometimes in ruins, sometimes repurposed in other ways. There are cows in here. Many of the abandoned structures we passed had right-wing graffiti on them. Serbian crosses, or the U for the Croatian Ustaše. But with these cows, the graffiti read, Tito, come back. Cow? You're so beautiful. You're a good-looking cow.

Riding the Chira would be hard for most anyone. It was hot, if you'll remember. But for Jesse, it was all the more difficult given that he was riding on an empty stomach and severely dehydrated. The path was desolate. For most of the morning, we had seen more cows than people, and we hadn't even seen that many cows. Several times we stopped in the middle of the morning, we had seen more cows than people, and we hadn't even seen that many cows. Several times we stopped in the middle of the road, and Jesse lay in the shade to recover. After one especially sweltering stretch, we took a turn and found ourselves blasted by what felt like air conditioning, as if we had suddenly stepped into a mall. It was a cave. The limestone outcroppings that we struggled to ascend also had a softness to them, and we sat within the karst airflow.

Jesse mused that Evliya Chelebi, the famous 17th century traveler and fabulist, would have made the cave into a great story. We finished the final six kilometers of the ride, got out of the sun, and spent the rest of the day drinking water. So day two. How are you feeling about day two? I'm excited, Sam. I'm excited for day two. I think it's going to be a lot better.

I'm slightly worried about not really having eaten, but getting all that water is pretty amazing. I'm excited that we're going to be heading towards the Neretva river. Which is the river that runs through Mostar. And we're going to be staying in a bungalow in Szapljanec. And there's an Ottoman bridge that's kind of unclear but might be pretty early pretty old on a tributary called Klepci I think

and it's very exciting to see Ottoman bridges that are unknown to me and I think the climbing is not going to be as intense today. How about you? I'm just excited to keep going, see how the landscape changes. See where Ciro takes us. Yeah. Ciro, if you had to describe Ciro so far, how would you describe him, her, or they?

How would you describe him, her, or they? She was good. She was good? I'm just glad you didn't die yesterday. That was my concern. How can they even do this loud, Sam? What do you think? Just soaking it all in. We're actually at the halfway mark, more or less, from Dubrovnik to Mostar.

Yesterday felt like it would never end and today feels like it's all going too fast. But I'm also starting to get a little scared about the temperatures continuing. Just sitting here in the sun. Roasting. All right, should we keep riding before we get eaten by these bugs or melted? Let's get to get to Hútava. Let's get some ice cream. We're really counting a lot on Hútava coming through for us. We're really counting a lot on juteva coming through for us. I don't have the same hopes for juteva. I hope for shade, I don't know about ice cream.

I will take ice cream, but... Well, you are a more reasonable person than I. Let's go. Let's go! Let's go! Come on! Come on! Come on! As we rode onward, the landscape changed, becoming more fertile and watery thanks to the Trebisnitsa River.

Along the way, we continued to stop at former railway stations, and the terrific signs pointed to a rich world of commodity flows and population movement knitted together by the railway. There was Veljameda, where entire beehives were loaded onto the train, Turcovici, where locals were famous for bagging up to 700 ducks in a night and also using their boats to transport people through the mud of the neighboring floodplain to the train. And last but not least, there was the region where the impact of fish on potency was so great that Evliya Chelyabin himself noted that a virile man was asked whether he had eaten fish from Popovo. And as for Hutovo, we spoke to a nice old lady, but didn't find any ice cream. The region was more populous than our path on the first day, but it still had a deserted feel to it.

And this is the case not only because the railway no longer exists. It also has a more recent vintage. In the 1990s, the region and its people experienced terrible violence, including ethnic cleansing and genocide of Bosnia's Muslim population. As a result of the US-brokered Dayton Accords, these ethnic divides have only further hardened, and the region of Herzegovina we were riding through was squeezed between the breakaway Serbian portion of Bosnia known as Republika Srpska to the east and Croatia to the west. As Miran had warned us several days before, other creatures have filled up the spaces that humans have left behind.

There are also, would you say dozens of these kind of rock channels where the engineers and laborers cut through rocks on either side. Nice and shady. This is the most exciting and daunting tunnel so far. In the case of the one-time railroad tunnels turned bike tunnels, they had become home to bats. It didn't even smell that bad. And then, after a steep and rocky descent, suddenly the largest town we had encountered since the border of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and, miracle of miracles, a sprawling linden tree beside a shop with large refrigerators outside filled with cold drinks. We sat in the shade and drank water and watched as people drove up,

got out of their cars, considered the cold drinks, and walked away with one in their hand going on with their days. Riding a bike invited interactions of a different kind than might have happened had we been on a bus or in a car. Again and again, people asked us where we were coming from, where we were going, and reminded us, wow, it's really hot. Outside of the shop under the linden tree, a man went through this series of questions. He worked in Canada, but always came back to Herzegovina in the summer. The figs, the tomatoes, Toronto couldn't compare, he told us. He asked if he could help with anything, and then went on his way. Once, a man told me I looked like a Croatian bandit, which I think was a compliment, and also was not entirely inaccurate.

By the afternoon of day two, we had reached the bottom of the Neretva River Valley, rich agricultural lands that also bore marks of the more recent past. Around Čeplina, Croatian-led forces established prison camps at Tuteli and Gabela, where Bosniaks were interned and tortured. Amidst this landscape of violence is a humble Ottoman bridge. Sam, we made it to this Ottoman bridge over the Klepci, outside of Chapljana in Herzegovina. So we heard some lore about it, that because it's a single arch bridge, has it roughly the same form, one could say as the Mostar Bridge,

the local lore seems to be that it was like a warmup, a practice for the later Mostar Bridge. So yeah, maybe, except obviously there's tons of single arch bridges all over before and after. You can see the kind of structure of the bridge the arch the stonework and then and then on top i don't know how you would describe it it looks like a j rail divide highway divider freeway divider that these concrete blocks that form um a rail a solid stone handrail on either side there's also a ton of garbage things look like have been dumped here so it's not the most like

pristine site in the world but the klepti River underneath it's nevertheless is has this characteristic emerald green color that the rivers in Herzegovina have, the Naradva and others. It's quite beautiful. So we're gonna we're gonna walk across it. So what do you think, Jesse? It's very moving, actually. The simplicity of it and beauty. At first you think it's this kind of small thing, but going down to the water and seeing the size of the arch is really impressive.

So I think I remember reading what little I could find was that this had been moved. But it's really astonishing because it leads to like nothing. There's a big modern bridge, like this car that's about to drive. Bye. There's a big modern bridge just like less than a quarter mile down the road. There's no traffic. You can't drive cars across this anyway. You said it was moving. What do you mean?

It was moving just the form itself in this kind of unexpected location, seeing this and the thrill of seeing something that you've read about or located on a map and seeing it in person. But there's also, yeah, also any anything that's survived i was telling you about this article that makio keel wrote about um herzegovinian mosques and he just went down the line and the the list of of like periods of destruction sometimes reconstruction and destruction again, is rarely...

can be kind of overwhelming and daunting. So seeing something like this that survives in whatever form, even in this kind of pretty ugly-looking restoration, but the form, the foundation, the structure remains intact somehow. I don't know, I guess as a historian, it makes me feel hopeful that things are preserved. It's like the preservation of memory in this visible form.

And hopefully, like, it has some sort of sense of life, even if it's just these, like, popular tales about it, since so little seems to be known. Jesse wasn't alone in being moved by an Ottoman bridge in the Balkans. The Nobel Prize-winning Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić was famously entranced by one too, and wrote an entire book about it in The Bridge Over the Drina. Here are his words, translated by Lovett Edwards, about the bridge in Visegrad. How many viziers or rich men

are there in the world who can indulge their joy or their cares, their moods or their delights in such a spot? Few, very few. But how many of our townsmen have, in the course of centuries and the passage of generations, sat here in the dawn or twilight or evening hours and unconsciously measured the whole starry vault above. Many. And many of us have sat there, head in hands, leaning on the well-cut smooth stone, watching the eternal play of light on the mountains and the clouds and the sky, and have unraveled the threads of our small-town destinies, eternally the same, yet eternally tangled in some new manner.

On day three, we planned to ride from Ciaplina to the restored Ottoman fortress town of Početeli, and then onward to Mostar, where we would meet our friend Mariana. Početeli's Bosniak community struggled greatly in the 1990s, with many displaced by the advances of Croatian forces. Most have returned, but friends warned us that tensions remain, as many of the right-wing groups who presided over the ethnic cleansing are still in power. We wondered if that's what was happening when we were warned upon arrival, very kindly, not to park our bikes in one spot for fear of annoying people described to us as weird.

So where are we, Jesse? This is Pochitelli, Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the road between... I just saw the pomegranate tree beautiful, sorry distracted by the incipient baby pomegranates

so we're on the banks of the Neretva river on the I guess south side there's this point where the Neretva is a fairly wide valley, delta, as it reaches towards the Adriatic Sea at Neum. But here on the road to Mostar is a point where the valley kind of narrows into something like a canyon. And there's this magnificent Ottoman city. To me, the most intact example of what 15th, 16th, 17th century Ottoman menzil,

stopping place, fortress town, this kind of multi-purpose town, not so much a trading town, but much more a town about defense and mobility. So there's been tons of reconstruction, of course, defense and and mobility so there's been tons of reconstruction of course so it's not like it's original or pristine or anything like that but you've got and we're looking up at the um at the kule the the the fortress tower in this commanding position where you can see who knows how many how far you can see but in the distance and then there's this array this like cascading array of of domestic architecture that we're sitting in front of the of the jami which was built in the 16th century and then rebuilt in the 17th and the classic three semi-dome portico porch mucarnas hood over the

front door but really all the the uh soaring min with Moukarnas balcony and the big central semi-dome, all the classic hallmarks of the Ottoman grand imperial style. Moukarnas is impossible to explain, but it's a geometric form that sometimes people have described as being alike to stalactites in caves. described as being alike to stalactites in caves. So it's an almost prickly, quartz-like, crystal-like form. It actually, looking up at the bottom of the balcony up above us on the minaret, reminds me a little bit of those bat colonies that we saw in the caves where they were all clinging together, but a little bit more orderly than that.

You know that you're in the Ottoman world immediately with the mosque immediately with the the mosque defines it as as well as the the pretty ruined hammam the bathhouse but you can still see the distinctive multiple domes that you kind of give it away as a hammam but what gives it away as being a Herzegovina in place they're these kinds of stone shingle roofs. We see a bunch of them right here, and they're used in all kinds. They basically cover what's the small settlement. Everything that's not the lead domed, like the hammam and the mosque, has these, but they're these big, chunking piece slabs of stone that are used that are that are installed like shingles um and they're they're on a diagonal so they have a diamond shape um

so it's just a way that the that whatever local traditions and local materials kind of infiltrate and even though this is so obviously Ottoman in so many ways, you know immediately where you are in the greater Ottoman world because of these roofs. Oh, there's also an incredible cypress tree, I should point out, in the courtyard outside this mosque. Often a site of cemeteries, holy places, dervish lodges. The site has been preserved for a long time. The Yugoslav state preserved it as a historical landmark, which was pretty good at doing as far as I understand. At some point in the Yugoslav era, an artist colony colony was established so up on top of the ridge

next to the old Ottoman tower fortress are these little humble buildings where I guess you could get some kind of artist residency and perhaps be inspired by the historical landmarks in the picturesque setting and the beautiful green river in the background. This mosque was destroyed in the early 1990s, August 1993, right at the height of the conflict with the breakup of Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Croatia. So it's been reconstructed pretty well. A lot of reconstruction has occurred over the past 30 years. Most of it pretty good. Under significantly challenging circumstances,

some mosques in places that were really deep in what's now referred to as Republika Srpska, so breakaway Bosnian territory that was trying to remove all of its Muslim population and Muslim landmarks and Muslim history. Places like Foca, which has an incredible mosque, was not only dynamited but also removed and dumped, so it made things particularly challenging for the restorers, incredibly challenging. Of course, the example most people know is the Mostar Bridge, which was also destroyed. So a lot of what we see as Ottoman monuments are things that have been reconstructed.

And of course, it's not the first time there was a ton of destruction of human life and also the cultural patrimony of the empire in the 1940s and the late 19th century, so there have been these episodes. However, it must be said that this doesn't lead to sort of an obvious and simple solution, that there's just something particularly violent or sectarian about this part of the world. The overwhelming majority of the history of this part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, of the history of this part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Ottoman Western provinces of Rumelia, was of coexistence. Obviously there were tensions,

and there's periodic violence, but there was not organized confessional sectarian violence on a regular basis. You can really, you know, not trying to be ideological about it, but really looking for examples of it, it's extremely hard to find. There's lots of violence. There's lots of banditry. And sometimes there's a bit of, there's an, you know, anti-Ottoman, anti-Turk, as it was expressed, sentiment being the, you know, the imperialist's power in charge, but nothing until the 19th century

approximates the kind of coherent struggle for power, the violence between the Croatian, Bosniak, and Serbian, all Slavs population of this area. Do you see this? There's some insane new bridge across the Neretva Gorge. It looks like it's still under construction. It's like a quarter of the way there? Yeah. Very thin reinforced concrete towers. You know, transportation infrastructure keeps evolving. It's a very stunning view from this little window of the of the Neretva

Valley. We can see the Neretva River. One side is gold, the other side is emerald. It's shimmering in the sunshine. And on the other side of the Neretva is our friend Chiro, the Chiro Trail. And I'm a little nervous because there's all this huge construction happening with this new bridge. I wonder how the trail is impacted. I feel like I can see the pathway in some spots, kind of how we've gotten to know it, carved into the side in a very even gradient. But we're going to be riding up the highway, so hopefully past this big construction area.

So we'll be able to get back to our dear Chiro and finish the ride into Mostar. Should we go down? Yeah. OK. Should we go down? Yeah. Okay. We weren't actually allowed to cross over to the Chiro Trail. Workers stopped us and said that even with our helmets, it wouldn't be safe to ride near the construction of the new bridge.

So we stayed on the road for a few miles, before we were able to cross the Neretva over to the Ciro. After one stop on the river to cool off, we were in the outskirts of Mostar, first riding past concrete plants and then pedaling by large housing blocks still bearing the marks of bullets and shells from the 90s. And then there we were, in the place we had been saying we were going, but I hadn't really expected to get to. Sam! We're here in Mostar. The old bridge, hiding in some shade in some hotel's parking lot with a great barber.

We're about to dismount and walk through the little reconstructed Ottoman center. The bridge and the two towers and we're gonna find our hotel. Hopefully our hotel has air conditioning and some cold water. Otherwise we're gonna need to locate some people, some cold beer how was the last stretch for you that stretch was very hot very hot and challenging dusty lots of construction trucks oh yes a lot of like little belly discomfort at this heat but we did it man can't believe it we're here it's a high-five sound good one more so you catch it Oh to grovny to most are they said it'll be hot and they were right amazing ride could not have done it without you I would have I

surely would have went out or something i definitely wouldn't have done it without you it was all your idea all your plan okay What's up? Good morning. It's a beautiful image of the bridge on the table. Wow. This is for the house. Look, look at me. We sat and drank water and beer and were even given some apricot brandy, happy to have made it despite the food poisoning and heat. Then we headed for the famous Mostar bridge

known as Stari Most, which is nearly 80 feet above the Neretva River. The bridge was built in the 16th century under the rule of Suleiman the Magnificent and under the supervision of Muammar Hayrettin. Now you can see the two towers. This was the one on the side and you can see the corner on the opposite side. Those cool Herzegovinian flagstone roofs. Jordan Jersey over there. Trinity, Jordan, Donchich. Sam, welcome to Stary Most. Looks like there may be some bridge jumping going on. And below us is the jadegreen Neretva River.

The bridge was infamously destroyed in 1993 by the shelling of Croatian forces. It has since been restored, though the city of Mostar remains quite segregated, with a largely Bosniak population on the east bank and Croat on the west. There's a pretty amazing image of the, sorry, when the bridge is destroyed, or the whole urban core is destroyed by bombing. I think around 1993 was the height of it.

And then this really rickety little bridge was the only way to get back and forth between the two sides so I mean looking at this image it's a big black and white image and then sizzle tourist shop it says no photo it looks like just completely bombed out devastated it's very hard to to to resolve this like super lovely summery tourist destination that's I mean part of partially because the the restoration is quite good and it's it's kind of settled in it's worn in over the years it's not so brand new and it really does feel like like you could just forget about that fluke episode and think that this had always been just miraculously

survived when in fact the scale of what people here had to do is really drastic When we returned from the bridge, we found our friend Mariana waiting for us, having come from the Serbian town of Novavaroš, which she reminded us had been under Ottoman rule all the way until 1917. Mariana recently defended her dissertation on language and the Ottoman Empire in the

South Slavic world. Yeah, yeah. No, since the defense, I didn't touch it, because if I go back to it, I'm going to fix it. Yeah, don't touch it. Don't fix it. So I'm not touching it, because if I start touching it, it's going to be a different thesis by a certain time. No, don't touch it. So I decided not to touch it, just to knit, embroider,

and do shit like that, so I don't touch it. Cool. I'm sorry, I became sarcastic. You became sarcastic. When were you not sarcastic before? Yeah, I thought you forgot. I thought you forgot so I kind of... Yeah, I remember. But you made me forgot in the meantime so I can kind of introduce myself.

Warm up slowly with the sarcasm. Yeah, I miss everybody. I haven't seen anyone in ages. Of course nobody hasn't seen anyone in ages. The next day, Jesse and I headed for Mostar's Partisans Memorial Cemetery, a monument to the largely communist fighters of all backgrounds who resisted the German and Italian occupation during World War II. The structure was designed by Bogdan Bogdanovich and opened in 1965. Two weeks before our visit, the monument was desecrated with every one of the gravestones, in the form of flowers, smashed by what are believed to be far-right forces.

Mariana told us she couldn't join. Yeah, you can see over and over, it's this beautifully terraced park, kind of overgrown with some weeds, but it has these monumental walls and these curving pathways that lead up, and each terraced level is a plane where the grave markers for the people who died fighting fascism, fighting against the Nazis, from Mostar, and people from every ethnicity, obviously represented here. So on each of the levels, we know the, we know from pictures there were these hand-carved stone markers, small humble things about a foot and a half across. So the people came and it's incredible seeing it. It was devastating reading about it, but seeing the

scale of the site, seeing the kind of relentlessness of this outburst of rage and violence and intolerance and just smashed stone like over and over and over and over and over again. It's really, really crushing. And there's this weird incongruity with the kind of tranquil peaceful seeming sleepy kind of central european feel of the you know there's just like a gas station and some apartments around the corner and the the memorial itself is is quite hard to find and unmarked. People here, we asked about it, say, like, people come and drink and do drugs and whatever, and it kind of shouldn't be visited at nighttime, and there's hooligans or whatever,

but it's just this hot, beautiful, perfect day with all of these crushed stones littering what is honestly a brilliant piece of memorial architecture and landscape design, earth art, I don't even know what the term is. There's this central motif, it actually looks like an inverted mokarnas but in a modernist style it's kind of like a drum that was the fountain so in the center there are these two walls on either side with the terraces in between ascending the hillside and the center of the very topmost terrace there's this drum fountain and that was apparently the architect's intention was to have an eternal

spring there and something very poetic from this part of the world where so much water comes out of stone rather than an internal flame. So this eternal fountain, you can see the stream channels. Obviously, this hasn't worked for many years. So there's this other story of the neglect, this sort of intentional or malign neglect of sites like this that represent Yugoslavia, socialism, a kind of idea of Slavic brotherhood

rather than sectarian identity. And just all of these headstones are shattered. You can see the birth date on some, you can see the death date on some, you can see first names, last names, but there are very few that you can see them all together on, so it's just a jumble of 1914, 1944, 1921, Muhammad. Kampung Kampung Later in the afternoon, we met Mariana again and headed south to Blagaj to look at a restored Sufi lodge in a scenic location.

As we walked toward it, ominous clouds built up on the horizon. In Bosnian we say tekija. Tekija. Aka Sufi lodge. And part of the point of being here for me is I didn't I didn't get to go inside yeah I know How do you describe this actually? It's not stones. A huge, sheer cliff. Limestone cliff shooting straight up. Striations of darker grey and lighter, kind of orangey-pinkish stone, little scraps of vegetation. By the way, I put a duos of rain stocks and it's just stopping.

Oh. Trust me, you're in safe hands. Good job. And at the very base of this huge cliff is the tekia, the blagai tekia or sufi lodge. I see a cliff, I see a cave, and I see a river coming out of this cave from as if by magic as if by some kind of tale or or myth the river is greenish blue it's a Gavine in color very clear there are I also see these nicely reconstructed Ottoman looking buildings, the complex of structures here that make up the lodge and its modern guise as a landmark and tourist destination. I see tourists from all around the world, many from Turkey

it would seem, based on the fragments of language that I hear people speaking. There are swallows, there are scrappy trees clinging to the side of this sheer cliff, incredible fig trees sprouting out of the limestone walls. So this whole landmass, Southeastern Europe, Balkan Peninsula, however you refer to it, is built on layers of limestone, which is incredibly porous.

So there are many of these amazing features of water, underground rivers, caves, rivers coming out of cliffs, probably most spectacularly here. is seen in the landscape here and in the river in the way that what appears to be a very impenetrable wall of stone is actually undercut by this major river source. I also want to swim in the water whenever I see it. I always want to jump in the water. I'm like a, yeah, I have like a lab quality. I want to get, I see water and I want to get in it. Especially when it's 100 degrees.

Well, first let's visit these, let's visit these dervishes. Jesse didn't get in the water. We went inside the tekke. It's freshly painted. There are little cabinets, little pointed arched windows looking out over. You can sit from this room where we are. You can see the source of the river. This is the prayer room. This is the prayer room. The prayer room of the Misafir Hane?

This other room right next to this is Misafir Hane. And then there's a storage. So behind the prayer room there's a storage and a kitchen. There's a big illuminated Quran in the window. Okay. Also lightning and thunder. Amas We waited in the teke for the thunderstorm to pass, and then we returned to Mostar. The next day we said goodbye. Mariana and I were going to take the bus to Sarajevo while Jesse would drive with Miran to the south where he would continue on his bike from Sutjeska to Montenegro and finally back to Dubrovnik. and finally back to Dubrovnik.

Thank you for coming. I'm so happy. Thank you for the bus ride. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was so great having you. Papa! Why are you on my head? I'm on your picture. It's so very happy. As Mariana and I walked away, a new group of bicyclists were wheeling into Mostar.

After a bus ride through tree-covered mountains and many monuments to those killed in the 1990s, we reached Sarajevo. Before Mariana headed home to Nová Város, I asked her why she didn't come with us to the Partizans Memorial in Mostar. A couple of years ago, I didn't know it even existed because that's not something people would tell you about. It's cool. I mean, you maybe heard of it, but you forgot. But I just wanted to remember it as it used to be.

I didn't feel like looking at those smashed stone flowers. As somebody who respects people who died for freedom, they were not more than 20-something on average, and they died for freedom, and that's something to appreciate not to smash that's why i didn't go i'm not very sentimental about monuments but i would go there again you said on the bus that you're not nostalgic because maybe i don't understand nostalgia very well but to me nostalgia is when you think about the past and you want something to be repeated something from

the past to be recovered or brought back to presence, but I like thinking about the past, but I don't have necessarily the idea that something from the past should be revived. Be it an idea, I don't know, whatever you can imagine, a building, I don't know, maybe it's too cynical, but historical building which is super well documented and the memory of which is preserved and if it just falls apart i know this is exaggerated but i'm not even a fan of necessarily reconstructing things and hectically and create you know like just preserve preserve preserve you know let it live let it serve let it, don't ruin it unless it's ruined on its own.

In that sense, I mean. But keep your memory fresh. I guess that's not nostalgia about the past. But no nostalgia. And also about this Yugoslavia, and I think that if Yugoslavia was good, it would survive. I'm a little bit like, it wasn't strong enough, unfortunately. But it's my homeland. I was born into it.

You can only have one homeland. And that's Yugoslavia for me. In history, and life too, most endings aren't expected. It was the last time, but you didn't know it. You couldn't know it. Only in retrospect can you see the end as process, Most endings aren't expected. It was the last time, but you didn't know it. You couldn't know it. Only in retrospect can you see the end as process, when you can look at documents or structural remains to try to recreate the world you lost

before you even knew you had it. That's what you wanted to ask? Weird questions, don't ask. Don't ask. I don't have any other weird questions. I don't have any other weird questions. I don't have any other weird questions. That's very good. We're good. We're done.

Thank you, Mariana. Thank you, Sam, for coming to Mostar and Yugoslavia. Of course, other endings are expected. You can look on the calendar or the clock or the map and see time running out, your destination approaching. Parting ways is inevitable, but it still sometimes comes as a surprise. You want to keep going. Thanks for listening to this special episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. Of course, as always, you can find

more information on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, including beautiful photos that Jesse took along the way, as well as a bibliography of relevant and further readings. If you want to learn more about Jesse's research on caravans in the early modern Balkans, keep an eye out for a standalone interview with him that we will be releasing soon. Balkans, keep an eye out for a standalone interview with him that we will be releasing soon. Thanks to Chris Grayton, Ariane Sadef Arous, and Harun Bulyane for production and editing support. Special thanks to Miran Hasibovic and the staff of IHouse Mostar, the Herzegovina Bike Project, everyone who waved to us along the way, and of course, Jesse Howell and Mariana Mishevich.

That's it for this episode. Until next time, take care.