Mostar at midnight

Clerks outside Mostar Old Town shops last fall -- not a friendly place

6/2
Tracy, our visiting ex-IRE buddy, Drew and I get a later than expected start on our weekend excursion and pull into Mostar after dark.
Mostar is simply a stop en route to our real destination on this trip but a fascinating place and so we decide Tracy, the travel editor, needs a fast tour of Old Town and downtown near our hotel, the ERO, even if it is dark already, cold and misty.
The gloom turned it into a striking visit. The war-wracked buildings along Santica Street which for 11 horrible months were the front line of a bitter war between Croats and Bosniaks in the city seem haunted.
Not just weeds, but sturdy saplings grow out of broken doorways and fly from upstairs windows. Sandbags are still stacked in the gaping window of one ragged structure and near it, a row of residences is now nothing but rubble and shell-pocked ruins in the shadows. But there’s a light in one window. Residents have come back to the only property they own and resettled, restoring one tiny section of the ruin. That has to be an eerie place to call home.
Stari Most, the Ottoman-era stone bridge destroyed in the 1990s war and restored by UNESCO, is beautiful lit by floodlights and Tracy decries her bad decision to leave her camera in the hotel. She reminds me that the original bridge was the work of the same famous Turkish architect who did mosques and bridges throughout the empire for Suley the Magnificent, Mimar Sinan.
We stop to eat at Mlini – Mostar’s Old Town once boasted a Mill and the old stone runways are still visible in the area.
Drew and I order cevapi, which you basically can’t go wrong with in BiH, but Tracy orders grilled mushrooms and gets the first of what will be a series of bad dinners. In this case, they are from a can and have never seen a grill.