A bridge to unite them
Jesenko Krpo was studying architecture in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, when war broke out in the former Yugoslav republic in 1992. During a break in the fighting, Krpo went to stay with a cousin in Prague. The move was meant to be temporary. But the war, one of a series of ethnic conflicts that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, lasted until 1995. In Bosnia, the war killed around 100,000 people and displaced more than 2 million.
It wasn’t until 1998 that Krpo returned home to his native Mostar, a city nestled in the mountains in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina known for an elegant stone bridge at its center that had spanned the Neretva River since Ottoman times. A tall, slim 55-year-old with a youthful face, Krpo saw the end of the war as an opportunity not just to return home but to help rebuild it. “Because everything is destroyed, so they will need me, my help as an engineer,” he remembers thinking.
The Rotary Club of Mostar, which includes (from left) Sinan Merzić, Zlatan Buljko, Marinko Marić, Nevzet Sefo, Martina Šoljić, and Jesenko Krpo, has members from Bosnia’s three major ethnic groups. Pictured here with the landmark Old Bridge behind them, members say they’re united by shared empathy.
Image credit: Jasmin Brutus
He isn’t being boastful, just honest. About 70 percent of Mostar’s buildings were heavily damaged or destroyed by the fighting, including the 16th century Stari Most, or Old Bridge, which gives the city its name. The stone arch, a masterpiece of Ottoman architecture dating back to when Mostar was a Turkish garrison town, collapsed under relentless shelling.
It wasn’t just the structures that needed repair. Once known for having the most ethnically mixed marriages in the region, Mostar was now divided along the Neretva, with Bosnian Croats on one side and Bosniaks, the city’s other main ethnic group, on the other. It was the same picture across the country. The Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war with an imperfect peace kept Bosnia intact but largely divided along ethnic lines and with a weak central government.
Amid that perpetual political stalemate, the Rotary Club of Mostar hoped to achieve what the politicians couldn’t. Chartered in 2002, it was, as far as members can tell, the first multiethnic organization to emerge from the city after the war. The six businessmen who initially organized the group included Krpo’s father. The club “was the beginning of a very positive thing for connecting people, especially in Mostar, where the city was very, very divided,” Krpo says.
One of the few remaining charter members, 70-year-old Marinko “Maka” Marić, was attracted to Rotary’s approach to peacebuilding by addressing the underlying causes of conflict. A retired economist now working in real estate, Marić says Mostar “needed such a club to be a symbol of tolerance.”
Culture and camaraderie
Celebrating the region’s culture is central to the Rotary Club of Mostar’s approach to building community — and having fun. Several members, including Jesenko Krpo, play music. He is a guitarist with a rock band called 45° C in honor of Mostar’s hot summers. He also plays the tamburica, a long-necked lute, in a traditional music group called Mostarski Tamburaši.
Music is something Krpo has been doing since childhood. In elementary school his band was called Shakespeare. “I earned my first money playing as a 12-year-old kid,” he says.
Krpo has performed in cafes, bars, restaurants, and at parties. He even played during the war as part of a cultural organization of Muslims called Behar. Among those in the audience these days are Rotary club members like Martina Šoljić, who studied piano at music school before deciding to become a surgeon.
Before the war started “we were like one family,” he says. To re-create that camaraderie, it was obvious what the club’s first project should be.
Members set out to bridge the divide — literally — by helping reconstruct Stari Most. Linking two fortified towers, the bridge was long a symbol of peace and friendship and the center of the city’s life and identity. Generations of daredevils plunged over 75 feet from its ledge to the river in diving competitions. Many works of art depict the structure. It was so beloved, the community insisted on an exact replica, which was painstakingly reconstructed using stone from the same local quarry that supplied the original.
Five of the Mostar club’s 21 members at the time — including architects, civil engineers, and a city administrator — aided in the bridge’s reconstruction, which was carried out under the auspices of UNESCO.
Completed in 2004, the bridge is a symbol of reconciliation and the centerpiece of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “This is our legacy that is still present, to unite the people,” Marić says.
Keeping faith with a city
Although the club’s current ranks are small at 13 members, they include representatives of Bosnia’s three major ethnic groups and two women. Shared empathy and understanding unites them. They also “all like wine,” jokes Club President Sinan Merzić. He joined the club in 2016 because of its “good deeds and nothing else.” Among those deeds are scholarships for orphaned children, holidays for children with special needs, and support for a program that educates Romani girls. The club is overseeing funding for a local nonprofit called Minores that supports people who are homeless.
Members also help provide equipment to dentists volunteering to treat children. That project developed the way most of the club’s projects do, with a member noticing a need. General and thoracic surgeon Martina Šoljić discovered the situation while talking with dentists working at the same city hospital as she did. A confident and good-natured 43-year-old with braces, Šoljić spent her childhood in Sarajevo with frequent visits to extended family in Mostar. Green and clean with a river running through it, Mostar is the most beautiful city in the region, she says.
But Šoljić wasn’t able to call the city home until she finished her medical training in 2008. During the war, Šoljić and her family fled Sarajevo, passing barricades and soldiers on the way to resettle in Croatia.
Although she now works and lives primarily in Croatia, Šoljić won’t abandon the club she has been part of since 2021 — or Mostar. “For many years it was kind of devastating,” she says of the city of around 100,000. “No one really cared about it.”
She and other club members, like Zlatan Buljko, are helping change that. During the war, Buljko worked for humanitarian organizations in the city. A member since 2005, Buljko, who is 70, is considered the club’s “godfather.” The two-time past president believes the club’s multiethnic status is its most important attribute.
Šoljić agrees and says its reach is remarkable for its size: “Let’s say we don’t do big things but the things we do, they really matter.”
Katya Cengel reported this story with the support of a fellowship from Project Mostar, a UK-funded initiative to foster civic, cultural, and economic life in the city through revitalized public spaces.
This story originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.