Notas del episodio
In 1557 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent committed 300,000 in silver to replace a swaying chain bridge over the Neretva in Mostar. The job went to Mimar Hayruddin, a student of Mimar Sinan, who by legend arranged his own funeral for the day the scaffolding came down. His single humpbacked arch, four meters wide, nearly 30 meters across, and 24 meters above the summer river, became the widest human-made arch in the world, gripping limestone abutments cut into the cliffs and bonded with mortar that sources say used egg whites. The traveler Evliya Çelebi compared it to a rainbow, and its tower guards, the Mostari or bridgekeepers, gave the city its name.
Young men leapt about 24 meters into the icy river, a rite that became an official competition in 1968 and later a Red Bull Cliff Diving stop. On November 9, 1993, during the Croat-Bosniak war, the bridge collapsed under HVO artillery fire. The ICTY ruled it a legitimate military target because it carried Bosnian army supplies, while scholars call its destruction memoricide, and a video released in April 2023 shows an HVO tank firing more than 50 rounds into it. A coalition including the World Bank, UNESCO, and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture raised 15.5 million dollars, and the rebuilt bridge opened on July 23, 2004.
- How wedge-shaped voussoirs squeeze tighter under their own weight
- The Halebija and Tara towers guarding either end of the crossing
- Commander Slobodan Praljak's claim of a hidden mine, which most historians reject
- Hungarian army divers recovering original stones that proved too fractured to reuse
- Fresh tenelija limestone, hand tools, and molten lead joints in the rebuild, followed by a local diver's first leap