The bridge that was rebuilt from its own river

The Stari Most was finished in 1566 and stood until half past ten on the morning of 9 November 1993, when it was shelled into the Neretva. It had no military value by then. The town was already divided and the bridge already unusable. That is why the destruction registered internationally the way it did: it was legible as a statement rather than as a tactic.

The reconstruction took eleven years and was, deliberately, not a modern build. Divers recovered stones from the riverbed. The same tenelija limestone was quarried nearby. The mortar was mixed to the old recipe. Hungarian and Turkish stonemasons worked with techniques reconstructed from Ottoman documents, and the arch was raised on wooden scaffolding of the kind the original builder would have recognised.

It reopened in July 2004. The divers went back to jumping off it — twenty-four metres, a tradition since the 1600s, and still done by young men from the town who train for years and are paid by the crowd.

What visitors notice, if they stay past the bridge, is that the reconstruction stops at the water. Walk two streets back and the front line is still there: buildings shelled and left, a bank tower used as a sniper position, weeds through the concrete. The bridge was rebuilt because the bridge was famous. The city was not.

Mostarians talk about this more openly than outsiders expect. There is no single agreed account, and asking a taxi driver will get you one version, asking a museum guide another, and asking someone in their twenties a third that begins 'I was not born yet, but'. Take all three.

The best hour of the day here is between six and nine in the morning, before the coaches arrive from the Croatian coast. The bazaar is a market rather than a stall row, the divers are asleep, and the bridge is a way of crossing a river.

That is the thing the reconstruction actually achieved. Not a monument. A crossing.