From Sarajevo: Mostar, Počitelj & Blagaj — Herzegovina Full Day

Head southwest from Sarajevo through the mountains toward the Neretva valley. The guide introduces Bosnia's complex heritage: the medieval Bosnian Kingdom (independent from both Serbia and Croatia), its conquest by the Ottomans in 1463, and the 400 years of Ottoman rule that shaped every town, fortress, and bridge in Herzegovina. The road follows the Neretva River gorge, where the limestone cliffs rise hundreds of metres above the jade-green water.

The first stop is Konjic, an Ottoman bridge town in the upper Neretva valley. The Old Bridge of Konjic — built in the 17th century, destroyed in the 1993–1995 war, and rebuilt in 2009 — is a nine-arch stone span over the fast-moving Neretva, designed for the same purpose as Mostar's bridge: controlling the river crossing on the route between the Adriatic and Sarajevo. The guide covers the specific destruction and reconstruction of Herzegovina's bridges during the war, and what their rebuilding means for the communities on either side.

Počitelj is unlike any other settlement in the Balkans: a complete Ottoman walled town frozen in the 15th–16th century, climbing a limestone cliff above the Neretva in a single tight cluster of towers, a mosque, a clock tower, a hammam, a caravanserai, and stone houses terraced up the hillside. The defensive citadel tower (Kula) at the top commands the entire Neretva valley. Počitelj was developed as a frontier garrison town after the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia and was one of the most important defensive positions on the road from the Adriatic to Sarajevo. Severely damaged in 1993, it has been partially restored and remains inhabited — one of the only continuously occupied Ottoman-era walled settlements in Europe.

Mostar is the de facto capital of Herzegovina, built around the Ottoman bridge that gives the town its name (Mostari means 'bridge keepers'). Stari Most — the Old Bridge — was built in 1557 by the Ottoman architect Mimar Hayruddin, a student of Sinan, as a single bold arch of cut limestone across the Neretva. For 436 years it was the longest single-span stone bridge in the world. In November 1993, Croatian forces deliberately destroyed it with tank and artillery fire. After the war, international teams recovered the original stones from the river bed, quarried new stone from the same mountain, and rebuilt the bridge using 16th-century techniques — completed in 2004. Walk the bridge, the cobbled Kujundžiluk bazaar, and the Ottoman mosques and hammam that surround it.

The final stop is one of the most extraordinary architectural settings in the Balkans: the Blagaj Tekija, a 16th-century Dervish monastery (tekija) built into the mouth of a cave at the source of the Buna river, where the entire river emerges from a cliff face 200m high. The tekija dates from around 1520, built for the Bektashi Sufi order on a site considered sacred since the Middle Ages. Above the tekija on the cliff, the ruins of the medieval Stjepan-grad fortress guard the approach — the castle of the last Herzegovinian prince before the Ottoman conquest of 1466.