Both Sides of the River: Belgrade, Sarajevo and Mostar

The Bridge and the Bullet: Belgrade to Mostar

There’s a moment, strapped into an aisle seat or maybe just in the back of a stranger’s Volvo, when a trip stops being a vacation and starts becoming something else. Something heavier. It’s that fleeting moment every traveler knows, when you wonder if maybe you should have just stayed home.

Belgrade: An Introduction, Whether I Wanted It or Not

I left London under a sky that seemed to be sending a message—cold, wet, gray, the kind of morning where the sun never quite bothers to show up. Underground to the Heathrow Express, Terminal 4, a long look from a stone-faced man in line at the Air Serbia desk who could have stepped off a Cold War film set. Underground. Terminal. Dark skies. Maybe I was projecting. Maybe not. Two and a half hours folded into an economy seat clearly designed by someone with a grudge against anyone over six feet tall, and I unfolded myself into Serbia. Immigration took five minutes. No questions. Stamp. Welcome to Belgrade. My driver Voxi—also my Airbnb host—brought up the Balkan Wars before I’d even gotten my seatbelt on. Not because I asked. Because it’s simply there, part of the air people breathe here. He talked about the 1990s the way someone talks about a storm they lived through, then moved on to Hitler’s bombing campaign in World War II, all before we’d left the airport road. As we drove into the city, he pointed out New Belgrade—mile after mile of gray, brutalist concrete blocks, Yugoslav-era housing built for function, not beauty. Then we crossed the Sava River into Old Belgrade, where the streets narrowed to something almost claustrophobic, stone walls pressing in from both sides, rain coming down harder now that night had settled in. I climbed into the elevator that hadn’t been updated since the building went up in 1931—the kind with a metal gate you pull shut yourself—and dropped my bags in an apartment that filled all my basic needs.

Unable to navigate the local equivalent of Uber Eats, I ventured out to find a nearby restaurant recommended by Voxi—a popular chain simply called Walter. The staff wore meticulously recreated vintage Yugoslav Partisan uniforms. The house specialty was ćevapi, a beloved dish across the Balkans—small, finger-sized sausages of minced meat, usually beef, lamb, pork, or some mixture of the three, grilled over an open flame and, at Walter, served sitting in a clotted cream sauce. Just as I started eating, the table next to me lit cigarettes. Turns out the Balkans are still very much a smoking culture. Between the cream sauce and the secondhand smoke, I wasn’t feeling exactly healthy—though after the conversation in the car, I had a feeling the people here had lived through bigger things than clogged arteries. I found two more bars that night, both the kind of places where no one knows your name. Smoke-filled, decorated with whatever had accumulated over decades rather than anything chosen on purpose. In one kafana—the traditional Serbian tavern—my only company at the end of the bar was a wooden carving of a woman’s torso wearing a wool cap and sunglasses. On leaving, I stepped backward and didn’t see the dog lying under one of the tables until my heel came down on his paw. He yelped, then growled and bared his teeth, and the owner scooped him up and gave me a look that needed no translation at all. I apologized fast, made my exit faster, wondering—half-joking, half not—whether that growl was some kind of omen. I was headed to Sarajevo next. Where World War I began. At 2 a.m., wide awake with jet lag, I lay there running the day back: the gray concrete, the war stories offered without prompting, the smoke, the dog. Heavy stuff for a first night. But maybe it was Belgrade telling me, in its own way, exactly what kind of trip this was going to be.

The Next Day: Belgrade Made Up for It

Sometimes a city needs a second chance to show you its lighter side, and Belgrade did. I spent the morning at the Nikola Tesla Museum—or tried to. The long lines bumped me to a 4 p.m. timed entry, which turned out to be a gift because it sent me instead to the Temple of Saint Sava, one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world. Gold mosaics, saints covering every wall, built in the Byzantine tradition, designed to create the feeling of heaven on earth rather than simply house a congregation. Construction began in 1935 but was interrupted by World War II and decades of communist rule before finally being completed—a building with as complicated a biography as the city around it.

On the walk back, I ducked into Monk’s Café for an espresso. Classic album covers lined the walls—Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, Frank Zappa—while Janis Joplin and Otis Redding played overhead. For the first time on the trip, I felt grounded. Music has a way of doing that. That evening I stopped at a Mexican restaurant called La Chona. I know how it looks—a guy who lives in Mexico walking into a Mexican restaurant in Belgrade. But it was the name. If you’ve ever spent time in Mexico, you know the song—“La Chona,” the Mexican party anthem that gets everyone singing and dancing whether they planned to or not. Made famous by Los Tucanes de Tijuana, the band from my adopted hometown, it felt like a little piece of home had followed me halfway around the world. The owners were from Mexico City. The Campesino taco was surprisingly good for being thousands of miles from Tijuana, and their house mezcal, Mexicat, came with a worm in the bottle—which usually means it’s marketed more for tourists than purists—but it was better than the worm suggested. When I asked about other spots serving Mexican spirits, they sent me across town to Ananasa Tri—Three Pineapples. After a rideshare and a little searching along a dark street, I found a cozy two-story tiki bar stocked with Siete Leguas, Fortaleza, Don Fulano, and a handful of mezcals—a selection you rarely see even in Mexico. With the bartender giving off a California dude vibe, the harshness of Belgrade disappeared. After pouring me a Don Fulano blanco, the dude recommended one more stop for agave spirits—Dragoljub New Balkan Cuisine. There, bartender Jovan and I talked tequila, mezcal, and spirits over a G4 Blanco and some much-needed local bread and cheese. Then he introduced me to rakia, the fruit brandy that runs through the heart of Balkan life. It’s more than a drink; it’s what you’re offered when you walk into someone’s home, and nearly every family proudly makes its own. He lined up tasting glasses of plum, quince, apricot, and grape—some unaged, others mellowed in Serbian oak with the smoothness of a good añejo. These guys take their spirits seriously.

In my quest to find great Mexican spirits in Belgrade, I ended up discovering rakia—the spirit of the Balkans—as well.

On this day, Belgrade came through in more ways than one.

Sarajevo: Four Faiths, One City

Some places you visit. Sarajevo, you feel.

A few weeks before this trip I’d written about tribalism—the idea that if we’re going to survive as a species, we need to think past tribe, religion, and border. Sarajevo handed that essay back to me on my very first afternoon. I stood in front of the Sacred Heart Cathedral, the largest Catholic church in a country that’s mostly Muslim. A few blocks in one direction, an Orthodox cathedral. A few blocks in another, a synagogue. Four faiths sharing a single city for centuries. Walking through the Old Town that evening, I heard the call to prayer drifting from a mosque at the same time the bells of Sacred Heart were ringing—different traditions, same streets, same evening air. And then, at my feet, a Sarajevo Rose—a mortar scar in the pavement filled with red resin, marking where someone died during the siege. The red isn’t accidental. It’s there so you don’t forget. The siege lasted nearly four years in the 1990s—the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare—when the same city that had spent centuries proving coexistence was possible tore itself apart instead. I’d crossed into the Old Town over the Latin Bridge that morning—the spot where, on June 28, 1914, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife, Sophie, as their car passed by. That single gunshot set off a chain of alliances and ultimatums that, within weeks, dragged the great powers of Europe into war. That morning, though, it was just a bridge over a gray river, snow on the hills, people on their way to work.

Meeting of Cultures: Where East Meets West

The next day, an Arctic wave dropped snow on the city and I traded my baseball cap for a wool beanie—partly for warmth, partly because the cap screamed American tourist a little too loudly. Sarajevo, I was learning, sits in a valley ringed by the Dinaric Alps—the same mountains that made it home to the 1984 Winter Olympics, and the same ones that give the city its intimate, wrapped-up feeling, so different from Belgrade’s sprawl. Those mountains carry a darker footnote too: less than a decade after the world watched bobsledders race down Mount Trebević, Bosnian Serb forces used those same slopes as artillery and sniper positions during the siege. The bobsled track is still there, riddled with bullet holes, a monument nobody planned on building. Founded by the Ottomans in the mid-1400s and later absorbed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1878, Sarajevo wears both histories at once. Walk one block through the Old Town and you’re surrounded by mosques, bazaars, and the smell of grilled meat. Walk another and the architecture shifts entirely—suddenly you’re in Vienna instead of Istanbul.

“Where East meets West” isn’t a marketing slogan here. It’s just an accurate description of a ten-minute walk.

Dinner was Bosanski kolačići—veal meatballs in tomato-paprika sauce over mashed potatoes, which is basically Bosnia’s whole story on one plate: an Ottoman meat dish served with an Austro-Hungarian side. I finished with a glass of herbal rakia, the local answer to seemingly every occasion—welcome drink, toast, nightcap, probably cold medicine too if you asked around enough.

An Unexpected Celebration: The Night Bosnia Won

I expected an uneventful day. Two museums—one marking the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand just steps from the Latin Bridge, the other telling the long, heavy story of Sarajevo’s Sephardic Jewish community, who arrived after being expelled from Spain in 1492 and built a thriving life here that the Nazis and their local collaborators very nearly erased centuries later. It’s the kind of museum that makes you walk more slowly on your way out. That night, over a quiet dinner, I asked a waiter why the restaurant was so empty. “Everybody is at the bars,” he said. “Big game tonight.” Bosnia was playing Italy in a World Cup qualifier. I ended up at a bar I had visited the night before, Club Mash, which was already packed. The owner, Dono, recognized me and said, “I have seat for you.” A German traveler named Michael pulled up next to me, and the two of us—strangers an hour earlier—watched the match with a bar packed wall to wall with Bosnians and Europeans, everyone speaking a different language and rooting for the same team. The game went to penalties. Nobody in that bar breathed. And when Bosnia won—punching their ticket to the World Cup for only the second time in the country’s history—you could feel the joy and relief. The place exploded: hugging, shouting, glasses held high. I walked out into streets that had turned into one enormous celebration. Horns, singing, flags waving, strangers high-fiving strangers. I’d come to Sarajevo for the history. I got a night I’ll remember just as long for entirely different reasons.

Time Travel: The Road to Mostar

The bus ride out of Sarajevo followed a route two thousand years old—the same natural corridor the Romans once used to push into the Balkans, chasing silver buried in the Dinaric Alps. Long before pavement, this was a pack route, walked by traders and mules moving goods between the mountain interior and the Adriatic coast. The Ottomans understood the same lesson later: control the trade routes, and you control the region. Mostar’s name literally means “bridge keepers.” The city exists because the Neretva River narrows there and the rock on both banks made a crossing possible—first with a wooden suspension bridge that one 17th-century traveler said swayed so badly people crossed it in mortal fear, and eventually with something sturdier. Suleiman the Magnificent commissioned the replacement in 1557, and the job fell to Mimar Hayruddin, a student of the legendary Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan. Hayruddin was reportedly warned he’d pay with his life if the design failed, and after nine years of construction, the legend goes that he prepared for his own funeral on the day the scaffolding finally came down. It held. Completed in 1566, Stari Most had no real foundation at all—just limestone abutments anchored straight into the cliff walls on either side, with mortar said to have been mixed with egg whites, horsehair, and ash. At the time, it was the widest man-made stone arch in the world. Two fortified towers still flank it, Halebija and Tara, the original bridge keepers the city took its name from.

Capturing the Light: Sunrise on the Old Bridge

I got up at 5:30 a.m. to catch the Old Bridge at golden hour, and it was worth every minute of lost sleep. Just me, two fishermen, and the Neretva River, no tour groups, no souvenir stands, the first light of day hitting four-hundred-year-old stone.

One of those rare travel moments where you don’t say anything. You just sit with it.

In 1993, the war that had started between Bosniaks and Serbs had turned into a second front here, Croat against Bosniak, and Stari Most found itself in the middle of it in the most literal way possible. The Bosnian army had been using the bridge as a supply line, which put a 427-year-old landmark squarely in the crosshairs of the Croatian Defence Council on the opposite bank. The shelling wasn’t a single strike—witnesses described tank rounds hitting the span repeatedly over the better part of a day before it finally gave out and dropped into the Neretva on November 9, 1993. Decades later, an international tribunal would rule that the bridge had technically been a legitimate military target, a legal footnote that does nothing to soften what its loss actually meant to the city. People who lived through it describe watching the bridge fall the way you’d describe watching a person die. It wasn’t just stone. It was the one thing in Mostar that had never picked a side. Reconstruction took an international coalition—UNESCO, the World Bank, and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture—with Hungarian army divers recovering original stones from the riverbed and Spanish engineers handling the rebuild itself, using the same limestone and the same Ottoman techniques as the original. The bridge reopened in 2004 and was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site the following year. The story of its destruction still hangs over the place.

A Divided City: The View from Above

My guide that afternoon, a young Bosniak named Omar, talked about his country the way people here seem to—pride and sadness in the same breath: pride in Bosnia itself, sadness that the divide between Bosniaks and Croats still hasn’t closed. We drove out to Blagaj Tekke, a Sufi monastery built around 1520 into the base of a 240-meter cliff at the source of the Buna River. The building itself is Ottoman, but the ground it sits on is older than that—the tekke was built atop the ruins of an earlier Bogomil site—remnants of a medieval heretical sect once persecuted by both Rome and Constantinople, one more layer in a place that seems to collect them. Next door, a mausoleum holds what’s believed to be the remains of Sari Saltuk, a 13th-century Sufi missionary. Behind the tekke, the cliff hides a cave that feeds an underground karst river, which comes rushing out to form the Buna itself—one of the most powerful natural springs in Europe. Dervishes have chanted here three nights a week for centuries, on and off, banned outright for a stretch under Yugoslavia before the tradition found its way back. It’s not an ornate place. It’s a quiet one, and the quiet—along with the roar of that spring just outside the door—is the point. From the Skywalk on Fortica Hill, you can see the whole geography of Mostar’s divide laid out at once—the river cutting the city in two, minarets on one side, church towers on the other, Croat west and Bosniak east. Omar told me, over a dinner of Kureljača—a traditional baked pie of potatoes, eggs, and flour, served with creamy kajmak—that schools in Mostar are still segregated. Bosniak children in the morning, Croat children in the afternoon. Same building, same desks, different students. Even the football clubs remain divided along the same lines. Before the war, Velež was Mostar’s club, supported across the city and playing at Bijeli Brijeg Stadium. During the conflict, Velež was forced out, and the re-established Croatian club Zrinjski took over the stadium. Today, the rivalry mirrors the city’s enduring ethnic divide. And yet standing high above Mostar, it was hard to feel anything but hope. Same language. Same food. Same sense of humor on both sides of that river. History, religion, and politics drew the line between them. But the bridge still means what it has always meant—that sooner or later, the two sides have to meet in the middle.