The oldest person to ever leap off the twenty metre-high Old Bridge in Mostar was a sixty-five year old German, and he broke a vertebra. In 2003 he stepped into the divers’ clubhouse on the west side of the bridge, slapped down the €25 (it goes towards bridge upkeep) necessary to be trained for a feet-first jump and demanded they let him do it. After being told he was too old, he said he’d prove he wasn’t by trying a head-first dive off the bridge, a far more difficult feat. He did it with just an hour’s training and was lucky to survive.

I’m sitting in that very clubhouse, flicking through a large plastic wallet that is used to record the names of each and every non-local to ever jump off Mostar’s beloved Stari Most. It’s midday and outside I can hear one of the local jumpers trying to pull a few more euros out of the waiting tourists before he drops himself into the frigid water of the Neretva River that flows rapidly through the city. Having seen him jump earlier I know he’s wearing a pair of bright yellow trunks and flexing the muscles under his perfectly shaved skin to persuade middle-aged Japanese women to part with their euros. The official currency of Bosnia & Herzegovina is the Bosnia & Herzegovinian Convertible Mark, and using the euro is technically illegal, but almost all of the un-taxed traders accept both. Ironically they prefer the euro, as the Convertible Mark can’t actually be converted. Most UK banks can’t get hold of them so I had to make my way with euros until I could find a cash machine.

Next to me sits my cousin, taller even than me, and broader. His face is slightly sunburnt but the brown is coming through. He’s examining a foot- long unexploded shell, rolling the dense, rusted metal over and over in his hands. The longer we’re in the Balkans, the less like tourists we feel. Across from the both of us is Zika, the owner of the hostel we are stay- ing in. He is thirty-seven, tall, barrel-chested and bald. He wears a faded blue t-shirt and 3/4 length khakis, with flip-flops on his feet. Behind him on the wall of the clubhouse is a framed, faded photograph of a younger Zika wearing a lot less than he is now, at the top of the bridge with his arm around an older gentleman who is also in nothing but swimming trunks. Zika catches me looking.

‘My coach,’ he says. ‘That’s me after my first jump. He was killed in the war.’

Zika was a professional bridge jumper for more than ten years before settling down, marrying the lovely Nina, and opening a travellers’ hostel with her. Yet he seems nostalgic as he stares at the picture of himself. There’s no sadness, no anger about what happened to his coach, just a quiet prayer for the past. There isn’t space for anger in this city. Or grudges. In Mostar (in fact in most of Bosnia & Herzegovina) there are three main ethnic groups. The majority are Turkish-Muslim-Bosnians (‘Bosniaks’), then there are Croat-Catholic-Bosnians and Serb-Orthodox-Bosnians. These three tribes are squashed together despite having been at each other’s throats twenty years ago. When Bosnia & Herzegovina seceded from Yugoslavia the Ser- bians attacked, and shelled Mostar into a state that Zika has compared to Dresden at the end of the Second World War. Then, when the dust started to clear, the Croats (who had fought with the Bosniaks against the Serb oppressor) began a well-planned and savage genocide against the Bosniaks on the western side of the river. These three groups now live in a peaceful but tense situation, under the watchful eye of the UN.

The bridge jumpers are one of the oldest manifestations of Mostar’s history, Zika explains:

‘They started the custom after the original bridge was built. The Ottomans, you know? The first jumpers were the builders who worked on it. They jumped to celebrate its completion.’

I check the guidebook. Commissioned by the sultan Suleiman the Mag- nificent in 1557, the original bridge was finished sometime in 1566-7. It’s refreshing to realise that people more than 400 years ago possessed
the bravery and thirst for excitement that is necessary for jumping off the bridge these days.

We leave the clubhouse and Zika leads us through the cobbled streets of Old Town. I can feel the plasma in the blisters on my feet (painful reminders of the ascent my cousin and I made of Sveti Ilija in Croatia two days ago) ebb and flow as we wander the uneven surface. The thoroughfares were originally built wide to accommodate the Ottoman horse-drawn carts, but now the shops explode out into the road like a Berber souk, with bright reds and whiffs of incense, leaving us to wheedle our way through the hordes of tourists examining the street-mounted wares. The custom of lunchtime in Mostar is to take a long break, perhaps two hours, and leave your stall in the hands of your beautiful, persuasive daughter, so we’re smiled at on all sides by dark-eyed, brightly dressed young women as we progress. The majority of them are selling mass-produced scarves, bracelets and ornamental daggers, but occasionally we’ll come across a more sombre shop and hidden away in its dark, cloying innards will be WWII, Yugoslavian and sometimes Nazi uniforms, bayonets and paraphernalia.

Zika takes us up to an old Serbian machine gun bunker on Hum Hill, to the southwest of Mostar Old Town. It is next to the gigantic white cross the Croat-Catholic-Bosnians had built after the war, mostly to spite the Bosniaks.

‘You are lucky,’ says Zika as he leads us along the white scree path over the hills, ‘usually I have more than twenty people on this tour. But it is the end of the season, so is just you two.’ My cousin and I smile at each other.

Zika points out several red and white striped poles that lead a trail through the rough brush on either side of the path.

‘Mines,’ he announces, ‘occasionally some men from the UN come to dis- arm them, but not very often. These hills,’ he stretches out a tanned arm and gestures to the rolling, placid peaks that surround us, ‘covered in mines.’

My cousin and I look at each other again, mentally scrapping our plans to go hiking tomorrow morning.

We reach the bunker, an ugly grey block that has fallen into extreme dis- repair despite being used less than twenty years ago. A small snake slips lithely through a pitted loophole and disappears into a stack of copper- coloured sandbags.

Zika begins speaking abruptly. ‘During the war I was shot twice. No, wait,’ he corrects himself. ‘Shot once, and blown up once.’ He lifts his Chelsea football shirt and turns around, showing us a scatter of white shrapnel scars in a rose-bud pattern across his back.

‘The metal from the shell, still in there,’ he says proudly. ‘Too dangerous to operate on.’ He lifts his right leg and points to his inner thigh, two inches down from his groin.

‘And sniper shot me here.’ He swings his arm, showing the movement the red hot bullet had taken through his thigh. ‘No need to remove that one,’ he grins, ‘went straight through.’

‘When was this?’

‘Both ’93,’ he replies, ‘same year the Bridge went down.’

The Old Bridge was shelled to smithereens by the Croats during the nine-month siege. Many people believe the Serbs destroyed the Old Bridge, but in fact they blew up nearly every way over the Neretva River apart from that one.

‘I was blown up first,’ Zika continues, ‘a JNA shell came down from the hills,’ he gestures east, ‘and landed in the house next door. Blew straight through the wall.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Exactly.’

I thought for a moment, looking out over the hills, imagining them crawling with Serbian soldiers.

‘Hang on, JNA? They were the Yugoslavian troops, weren’t they?’ I ask. ‘Why would the Yugos be shelling you?’

‘Ah, now, you must remember that Bosnia & Herzegovina had only just declared independence and broken off from Yugoslavia, and the Serbians controlled the Yugo army.’

I was shocked until I realised that after Bosnia & Herzegovina seceded, all that was left of Yugoslavia was modern day Serbia and Montenegro (Macedonia having declared independence six months before Bosnia).

‘So the JNA was basically now the Serb army?’ I ask. ‘Correct,’ Zika replies. ‘And they blew me up.’

My cousin and I step cautiously closer to the bunker. Zika laughs at us. ‘No mines around here, boys, don’t you worry.’

We stop tiptoeing and advance with more confidence. The side facing to- wards us, southwest, is completely collapsed, leaving just the front (facing the city) and the roof. It’s one piece of pebbly concrete, pitted with bullet holes and scraped by shell explosions. I look through one of the battered loopholes, down the hillside and into the city. My cousin points.

‘You can see the Old Bridge.’

‘Jesus.’

I put a loose fist to my eye and look through it. This is what the Serb sol- diers saw twenty years ago. Old Mostar, a sitting duck, naively placed in a naturally formed bowl by the Ottomans in the mid-1400s. Hills all around.

Zika’s been rooting around in the rubble outside. He joins us in the wrecked bunker and holds out his hand, palm up. Lying grossly in his scarred palm are six rusted shell casings.

‘AK-47,’ says Zika, ‘every time I take a tour up here everyone picks up some casings.’

I do some hurried mental maths. Tours four times a week, at least twenty people on each. Everyone takes at least one casing. That means around eighty shell casings are picked up every week. That’s 3,840 a year. Zika’s been do- ing these tours for more than five years and there’s still casings all around this bunker. That’s a lot of bullets fired, not to mention shells and mortars.

My cousin and I pocket a few of the casings each and Zika leads us back to the car.

‘So your leg?’ my cousin asks as we tramp over the sharp pebbles beneath us.

‘Ah, no that wasn’t JNA. Croats.’

I had been expecting that. While the Serbians had shelled and shot at Mostar and the river, they never actually sent ground troops into the city itself. The Croats, however, had done both. They held eastern Mostar (the Turkish, Muslim side) under siege for nine months, and cleansed the western (Croat, Christian) side of all Muslims. The lucky ones were forced over the river. Those less fortunate were executed, the women raped. Just thinking about this savagery brought bile to my tongue as Zika continued with his tale.

‘My friends and I were off to another friend’s house. To drink, you know?’ He winks. ‘We were sixteen, seventeen. During the war we had to run everywhere. Standing still made you an easy target. So we were running through the Old Town, trying to stay out of sight.’

I thought of quests to get drunk back when I was seventeen in sunny England, when the hardest obstacles were dodgy fake IDs and the host’s parents coming home early, not flying bullets and giant chunks of masonry in the street. Zika and his friends had had their teenage years taken from them.

‘We were nearly there but then I heard this “crack!” from across the river and then I got hit in the leg.’ He points to his upper inner-thigh again. ‘Lucky it wasn’t a bit higher, eh? Heh, heh, heh. Well it hit me and spun me all the way around, you know? I fell down but my friends grabbed me and pulled me into a house and the Croats didn’t have time to finish me off.’

I stand, agog.

‘Bloody hell,’ I say again.

‘It wasn’t so bad,’ Zika says, and my mouth drops open wider. ‘They band- aged me up and sent us on our way.’

‘No hospital?’ my cousin asks. ‘No hospital.’