Those seventy kilometres encompass everything that might round off the identity of Mostar as a seaside city deprived of the sea. The Neretva reaches it, but we don’t. Although I hear it quite often, the screaming of the seagulls above the river announces its presence, and a moment later it’s here, heaving under my windows, splashing. The Southerly brings it as well, seasons the air. Gales tear us apart in wintertime, but sunny days don’t let us down. The sun gets us out into the streets, we sit on the stools in front of cafes, like rain-soaked sparrows we warm our hollow bones, gazing at the ruins. We’ve got no sea to gaze at. Summers are sweltering. The city is swarmed by tourists. The mass of bodies runs like a river, blocks the view of destroyed buildings, dirt and rubbish. It’s impossible to resist the impression that they all come from an imaginary north and flow southwards down the cobbled streets. Nobody stays very long, we are just a stop along the way. The destination is downstream, down the Neretva, through the branches of tangerine trees, the fabulous Opuzen, and to the waves. But, none of that is necessarily true. It may well be just a story with which I feed my ceaseless longing for the brine and the blue. If the union of the sky and the offing were actually here, in front of our eyes, all these things we have to live with would be easier, more bearable.

From a city that used to be known as the cleanest and one of the most beautiful in the former Yugoslavia, Mostar became a valley of ghosts with a ruined economy and no serious progress-orientated political strategy that would serve the interests of its citizens. It’s a city of rubble overgrown with stink trees, potholed streets and empty shops, untidy, dirty, with heaps of rubbish in every corner. At first glance, this is where the story ends. But that can’t be all. A city lives as long as people live in it. It’s an organism that changes and evolves. One should look at it through a different pair of glasses. Give up on the old notions, and expectations that will never be fulfilled. Aesthetics is not a stable category, it, too, is subject to change. I don’t know what to call the aesthetics of Mostar today. I won’t call it aesthetics of ugliness, I’d rather go with aesthetics of dislocation, of brokenness. There is fragile beauty to all those abandoned, wounded buildings, rain-washed graffiti, trod-down parks, cars stranded on the pavements, plastic bags with which the gale decorates the trees, vandalised benches, dustbins and playgrounds, and the absence of any kind of order under the bright sun and the blue skies. A line from the film American Beauty comes to mind: “Sometimes there is so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in”. It’s a new, monstrous aesthetics, whose beauty lies precisely in the fact that it doesn’t hide what we are today. The internal image matches the external. Laid bare and exposed, we breathe a strange kind of freedom, we reject shame. This is what I tell myself to feel better, but most of the time I think about bridging that 70-kilometre gap and connecting with the sea. That, I’m sure, would put all things in their proper place.