3-082-280 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Ten Days in Bosnia: a street in Mostar, 1895. 'The vines which give to Mostar its detestable wines - an opinion we hold despite the unwavering eulogy of M. de Blowitz for every blade of grass that grows in the provinces - wear the aspect of health and maturity...Built at the foot of a limestone mount, lying in a well of the hills upon a plain of sand and boulders and moraines, the city writes its own history and its own climatic condition in a sentence - a city of war and heat, a city whose record is the record of slaughter and struggle, a city of dry and humid airs, of insurrection and of fever. Yet with all its unruffled antiquity, with its bridge at which architects may marvel and builders smite their breasts, with its narrow, crooked, and evil-smelling streets, there is a stamp of Western civilisation in the place which is deep enough to be amazing...Its crooked streets have witnessed massacres untold; its Mohammedan women, veiled with velvet masks so that they cannot speak even with their eyes, remind you of the preservation of the faith of the Prophet in all its severity and all its pristine purity'. From "Illustrated London News", 1895.