Bobryanmusic.com: The Tracks

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In the early 90's, as Bosnia-Hercegovina followed Slovenia and Croatia in a bid for independence from the Yugoslav federation, fighting broke out across that republic. Some of the fiercest would occur in the city of Mostar where, after Serbs had been driven out by a union of Muslims and Croats, fighting erupted between those two groups as well, dividing the city in two. A key point, strategically was the Neretva River and especially the Stari Most, or "Old Bridge," a 16th Century Turkish structure, built by Suleiman the Magnificent, that was the city's most important and visible landmark and tourist attraction.

Amid the heartbreaking human cost of the fighting, the destruction of the Stari Most created a symbolic image that resonated throughout Bosnia and across the world.

When my wife, Helen, and I first visited the city, about a year and a half after the signing of the Dayton Accords that ended the fighting, the massive blocks of the Stari Most still choked the river, a rickety temporary footbridge serving to tie the east and west banks together. There was a palpable sadness to the scene, that seemed to encapsulate all the destruction, misery, anger, fear and loss that we saw as we travelled through the country.

This instrumental was written to serve as opening "theme" music for the stage play "A Prison in the Heart" that I wrote in 2002, and which was first performed, in the Bosnian language, in Sarajevo. Although the story told in the play takes place in Sarajevo, still the image of the old bridge and its destruction seemed a fitting picture for the ending of the old life in Bosnia, the long traditions of that people that have now been forever broken and bent by a conflict that is still unsettled and unhealed more than 13 years after the fact. The destruction of the old bridge is, symbolically and in many ways actually, the end of a whole way of life in that part of the world and what it will become we still wait to see.