Herzegovina

Illyrian tribes held these hills before Rome: the Daorsi built the megalithic walls of Daorson above Stolac, and a Roman estate stands at Mogorjelo near Čapljina. In the Middle Ages the land was called Hum, a borderland of Serbian and then Bosnian rulers, whose nobles left thousands of carved stećci tombstones. The present name dates from 1448, when the magnate Stjepan Vukčić Kosača, whose stronghold stands above the Buna spring at Blagaj, styled himself herceg, from the German Herzog, duke. The Ottomans took Počitelj in 1471 and completed the conquest of the duchy in 1482.

Mostar grew up around a river crossing and takes its name from the mostari, the bridge keepers. Suleiman the Magnificent ordered a stone bridge, and Hayruddin, a pupil of Sinan, completed it in 1566. A peasant revolt that began near Nevesinje in 1875 set off the crisis that ended Ottoman rule, and Austria-Hungary, arriving in 1878, built the Neretva railway and promoted vineyards and tobacco. The country's strip of coast at Neum dates from 1699, when Dubrovnik ceded it to the Ottomans as a buffer against Venice.

The 20th century was violent here. In 1941 Ustasha units massacred Serb villagers and threw many into limestone pits, and Chetnik reprisals followed. In March 1943 Tito's partisans, carrying some 4,000 wounded, escaped encirclement across the Neretva at Jablanica, and in May 1944 German paratroopers almost captured Tito in his cave at Drvar. In 1992 Mostar was shelled by Serb forces; in 1993–94 Croat and Bosniak forces fought each other for it across the Bulevar, and Croat tank fire brought down the Stari Most on 9 November 1993. The bridge reopened in 2004, rebuilt in the original stone, but the city remains divided; six leaders of the wartime Croat statelet of Herzeg-Bosnia had their convictions upheld at The Hague in 2017.

Herzegovina's three communities have a clear geography. The west — Široki Brijeg, Grude, Posušje, Ljubuški, Čitluk — is almost wholly Croat and Catholic, flies the Croatian chequerboard and is served by Franciscan friars. The east, from Nevesinje and Gacko to Trebinje, is Serb and Orthodox, with monasteries at Tvrdoš and Zavala. Bosniak Muslims live mainly in eastern Mostar, Blagaj, Konjic, Jablanica and Stolac. Mostar itself is split along the old front line, with two universities, two football clubs — Velež and Zrinjski — and separate schools.

Since June 1981, when six local youngsters reported seeing the Virgin Mary on a hillside at Međugorje, the village has become one of the most visited Catholic shrines in Europe. The Vatican authorised official pilgrimages in 2019 and approved the devotion in 2024 without ruling on the apparitions themselves. At Trebinje the poet Jovan Dučić lies in a hilltop church built to his wishes in 2000.

Diving from the Stari Most is a rite of passage with a long history, and a formal contest has been held each summer since 1968, at the end of July. Konjic's woodcarving is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list; the rough, close-harmony ganga is sung in the western hills and epics to the one-stringed gusle in the east. Elsewhere in the Balkans Herzegovinians are held to be stubborn, shrewd and clannish, the product of a stony land that has long exported its sons. Flags announce allegiance everywhere, and politics is best left for locals to raise.

Mostar, with about 105,000 people in its municipality, is the only city. Trebinje has around 30,000, Livno about 37,000 with its villages, Široki Brijeg and Konjic between 25,000 and 30,000, and Neum under 5,000. The high plateaus of Glamoč, Bosansko Grahovo and Drvar, emptied by the war, are among the most thinly peopled corners of the country. Emigration is old and continuing: most Herzegovinian Croats also hold Croatian passports, and families everywhere have members working in Germany, Austria or Croatia.

The economy has lost its anchor, the Mostar aluminium smelter, long one of the country's biggest exporters, which stopped production in 2019. What remains is energy — the chain of dams on the Neretva and the Trebišnjica, the coal plant at Gacko, and new wind and solar farms on the bare plateaus — along with vineyards around Čitluk, Ljubuški and Trebinje, early fruit and vegetables from the lower Neretva, quarrying, and tourism. Međugorje alone draws upwards of a million pilgrims in a normal year, while Mostar's old town is crowded by midday with coach parties from Dubrovnik and Split. Mostar's politics are a national byword: the city held no local elections between 2008 and 2020.

Heat sets the rhythm. Summer days start early, stall in mid-afternoon and resume late, with swimming in the Neretva, the Buna and the Trebižat and long evenings in riverside cafés; Trebinje gathers at the morning market under the plane trees. Croatia's Pelješac Bridge, opened in 2022, now carries coastal traffic past Neum instead of through it.

Herzegovinian cooking leans towards the Mediterranean: olive oil, figs, pomegranates, cherries and wine alongside the Ottoman repertoire. Mostar's signature is sogan-dolma, onions stuffed with minced meat and rice, served with japrak, here often rolled in raštika, a dark collard green, rather than vine leaves. Lamb is roasted whole on the spit at roadside restaurants on the road between Sarajevo and Mostar, and meat, potatoes and bread are baked under the sač, an ember-covered iron bell. Trout comes from the Neretva and the Buna, grilled at tables set beside the spring at Blagaj.

The uplands produce the cheeses: sir iz mijeha, a sharp cheese ripened in a sheepskin sack, and Livanjski sir, a hard yellow cheese made at Livno on the Gruyère model. Western Herzegovina air-dries pršut, smoked ham cured in the bura wind, and the south makes ćupter, a firm jelly of grape must, and smokvara, a fig-syrup cake.

Wine is the region's pride. Žilavka, a white grape that gives full, dry, slightly nutty wine, and Blatina, a red, are native and scarcely grown anywhere else. Blatina cannot pollinate itself and has to be planted among other varieties, so a wet spring can mean almost no crop. Vineyards run from Mostar through Čitluk and Međugorje to Ljubuški and Stolac, and the monks of Tvrdoš outside Trebinje age Vranac in old stone cellars. The local spirit is loza, grape brandy, often steeped with herbs as travarica, rather than the plum brandy of Bosnia.

Mostar and its bridge come first: the single 29-metre arch of the Stari Most between its two towers, the Kujundžiluk bazaar lane, the Koski Mehmed Paša Mosque, whose minaret gives the classic view, the smaller Crooked Bridge and the Ottoman Bišćević and Muslibegović houses. The former front line along the Bulevar still has shell-scarred ruins, and Bogdan Bogdanović's Partisan Memorial Cemetery climbs a hillside in the west of the city.

South of the city, Blagaj has its dervish lodge of about 1520 beneath a sheer cliff where the Buna bursts from a cave, and Duke Stjepan's castle above. Počitelj stacks a mosque, a clock tower and a fort up a slope above the Neretva. The Kravica waterfalls spill 25 metres over a tufa amphitheatre on the Trebižat near Ljubuški, and Međugorje has the church of Saint James, Apparition Hill and the concrete cross on Križevac. Near by are the bird marshes of Hutovo Blato, the Radimlja necropolis of stećci outside Stolac, UNESCO-listed, and the walls of Daorson.

Upstream, the Neretva valley cuts a canyon between Prenj and Čvrsnica. Jablanica keeps the wrecked railway bridge of the 1943 battle, and Konjic has a six-arched Ottoman bridge, rafting on the upper river and Tito's nuclear bunker, built in secret between 1953 and 1979. Blidinje Nature Park lies on the plateau above.

Trebinje, 30 kilometres from Dubrovnik, has a plane-shaded square, a walled old town on the Trebišnjica, the 16th-century Arslanagić Bridge, moved stone by stone to its present site after a reservoir flooded the original one, and the Tvrdoš monastery. The Vjetrenica cave in the Popovo polje, rich in blind cave fauna, joined the World Heritage List in 2024. Wild horses graze the plateau above Livno, Kupres has ski slopes, and Neum is the country's only seaside town.