When was the mostar bridge rebuilt

Europe Bosnia marks anniversary of Mostar Bridge's demolition Memorial ceremony on historic bridge began with sirens ringing at exactly am Mustafa Talha Ozturk Please contact us for subscription options.

Turkey sends team to rescue national missing in heavy rain in Bosnia. Germany slams Serb leader's plans for Bosnia's dissolution. Senior lawmaker: Turkey stands by Bosnian brothers. Experience the diversity of Colombia, from the towns of Honda, Santa Marta and Cartagena to the coffee zone and the…. Mostar, on the banks of the mighty Neretva River, is the largest city in what is today Herzegovina.

The town grew in importance during centuries of Ottoman rule from to , when many beautiful and significant Islamic structures were built including the Kara Ozbegora Mosque below. The town is most famous for its bridge however, which was heralded as a classic example of Ottoman design and became a world-recognised symbol during the Bosnian war. The story goes that after a number of failed bridges, the Ottoman Sultan vowed to execute the engineer Mimar Hayruddin if his bridge collapsed too.

It would in fact stand for a further years, through Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule, as well as two world wars. The bridge, which connected Muslim communities in the east with Christian communities in the west, had come to symbolise the multi-ethnicity of Bosnia, so when it was destroyed by tank fire in during the bitter civil war, this was an incredibly sad moment for the locals.

After the war, the bridge was rebuilt, using many of the same limestone blocks that were salvaged from the river. The reconstructed Old Bridge and Old City of Mostar is a symbol of reconciliation, international co-operation and of the coexistence of diverse cultural, ethnic and religious communities. Today Mostar is well worth a visit. But during the conflict between Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, the Old Bridge became one of the war's most famous casualties.

On November 9, , Croat artillery hit the bridge's weak spot from the nearby hills, and the historic icon collapsed, plunging into the river below. The symbol of Bosnia-Herzegovina's cultural diversity lay in ruins.

Though the end of the war was nowhere in sight, Pasic started to plan for the reconstruction of the bridge. Also an engineer and urban planner, Pasic had received international awards for his painstaking efforts to restore and rejuvenate Mostar's old town before the war. Now the old town had become the site of some of the war's most vicious fighting. Thousands were killed and injured, and nearly every building was destroyed.

Pasic decided to rebuild Mostar. To raise support for the rebuilding effort, he said, "You need a very strong symbol, and the bridge is the crown monument of Bosnia. At the time of the bridge's destruction, Pasic was living abroad, a visiting scholar at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then it had to be decided whether these stones could be reused or new blocks of this rare stone had to be obtained from the quarries -if that was possible at all.

With the help of an "impact echo" method, the recovered stones were checked on invisible damages and cracks. The new ashlars from the Tenelija quarry had to be analyzed and catalogued, too. Stone ashlars with iron clamps and pins recovered from the Neretva. Of course, the researchers wanted to know why the bridge had "bled" and they found it out: When the original flooring had been sealed, a pink mortar containing bauxite and a red brown alumina had been used.

When the bridge collapsed, this binding material was washed out and it coloured the water. Up to now, nowhere in the world a comparable pink mortar has been found.

However, not only the building material of Stari Most is interesting, but also its architecture, as has already been hinted at. The most amazing feature of the old monument was its design, which was far ahead of its time and which caused this incredible resistance against the missiles, but finally also its downfall: In contrast to other comparable monuments of this era, the Mostar bridge is hollow inside.

Nowadays this is the most common approach for reinforced concrete construction. As they had been inserted in exactly chiselled pockets and fixed with liquid lead, these connections survived even the incredible forces of bombing and downfall. Further clamps at the vertical joints provided even more safety. For the joints, which were arranged in a semi-circle, Hajrudin used iron, hand-forged pins as third reinforcement.

Following the curve of the arch, each pin had a different position, which was a great challenge to lead casting technology. In the laboratory, the LGA staff reconstructed even the sequence of the historic building of the bridge and built a small part of the bridge wall on a scale of Here they noticed how long it takes to make connections of this kind: in two steps, at first the clamp was fixed on one side of the next ashlar to be set and then the corresponding pockets were chiselled accurately into the previous stone.

Finally a straight channel as thick as a finger was scratched into the surface from the pocket to the ridge of the arch and polished properly. As soon as the stones were assembled, the craftsmen filled the chambers with liquid lead, thus fixing the clamp ends.