New symbolic values of some of the antique and modern Bosnia and Herzegovina's bridges

Among the characteristics of a symbol there is the semantic variability, and with this we mean that by leaving a margin of an unexpressed meaning, it can easily be object of discordant interpretations. In today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country where the symbolic objects that mark the spaces are of great importance, the bridges that actually physically bond the two sides, a metaphor of passage and of testing, become loaded with identity values in the minds of those who deal with them each day; however, not always those values that the bridges represent become accepted by the entire community: in Bosnia sometimes the bridges separate instead of bringing together, and not only in the physical sense. In fact the “Stari most” in Mostar, a symbol of a city in which the national communities – unlike Sarajevo – use to live mostly separate, during the war it has been demolished by one of them since it was perceived as a cultural property of the rival nation. After its reconstruction, the new “stari most” frequented by the international tourism has become loaded with new symbolic values of western origin, something that has nothing to do with the cultural tradition in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Among all the bridges in Sarajevo on the Miljacka, places fulfilled with history, there are two of them on the top of which got started the great tragedies of global dimensions in 1914 and 1992, and they respectively opened and closed one of the most tormented centuries of the modern age. In the city, each of these two bridges awakes contrasting emotions in the population. In Sarajevo there is also the Kozja Ćuprija, an antique ottoman construction, which in the past facilitated the access to the city from the oriental Bosnia, today it separates the Serb Republic from the Bosnia and Herzegovina Federation, grotesque border in a region that no logical motivation could ever have divided. The symbol of Višegrad is the Mehmed Pasha Sokolović Bridge, an ottoman construction of the XVI century that Ivo Andrić’s book made famous in the world. However, this cultural heritage too - which is both material and immaterial – is absurdly divided today. Even if the bridge has “Muslim” origins, the memory of the writer that has made it immortal is being hated by the “bošnjak” cultural elite; the proof of this is the fact that the Andrić’s statue on the bridge has been crushed in peaces before the city became Serbian in the 1992. The cultural pride of Konjic is a “stari most” that doesn’t exist anymore in its original form, because it has been destroyed by the Germans in their withdrawing in the 1945. However, it is the emblem of the city; it is even in the city’s heraldic bearing. The Arslanagić bridge in Trebinje, vice versa, a magnificent asymmetrical construction of the XVI century, dismantled from its original site in the ‘60s and reconstructed a bit more downhill, today appears non-frequented, as if it was “forgotten” by the city that could recognize in other things its own identity emblems.