The Real Story of Konjic's Stone Bridge — and Why Nobody Got It Right Until 1976

I’ve stood on Konjic’s stone bridge a few hundred times. The tour guides I’ve overheard can’t agree on who built it. A Serbian king, they say. Or maybe Romans. Or a famous vizier — there’s always one of those in the Balkans. The real answer is a janissary officer from Blagaj, and it took a Bosnian scholar forty years of patient document-hunting to prove it. The short version of that story involves two Ottoman emperors’ signed decrees, a lost mosque wall inscription, an oral tradition preserved by one Konjic schoolteacher, and a single 1976 paper that settled the argument for good.

This piece is longer than the other things you’ll read about the bridge. That’s on purpose. Almost everything written about Stara Ćuprija in English — and most of what’s written in Bosnian tourism copy — gets one detail or another wrong. There’s a reason: the real story lives in Ottoman-era documents that were rediscovered in pieces over half a century, and tourism writers don’t chase citations. I did. Here’s what the documents actually say.

The legend that wouldn’t die

The oldest written speculation about Konjic’s bridge is from 1790. A Dubrovnik chronicler named Giacomo Luccari claimed a Serbian king named Hvalimir had built it, back somewhere in the 11th century. It was a guess. There was no source. For the next century, every writer who passed through repeated some version of the same story.

Arthur Evans — the English archaeologist who later dug up Knossos — came through Konjic in 1875 during the Herzegovinian uprising. He described the crossing as “a long beautiful stone bridge, the most beautiful of all seen to date,” and wrote, in effect, that Hvalimir built it and the Turks restored it. Vjekoslav Klaić echoed Evans in 1878. The Austrian newspaperman Heinrich Renner came through in the 1890s and argued the real builder was Ahmed-paša Sokolović in 1715. R. Michel repeated it in 1912. Even the Bosnian Islamic scholar Alija Nametak, writing in 1934, still accepted the Sokolović story.

All of this was wrong. There was never an Ahmed-paša Sokolović. (The Sokolović family is real and produced two grand viziers, but none of them was named Ahmed.) The 1715 date couldn’t be verified from any source. And as for Hvalimir — the medieval Slavic kings didn’t build pointed-arch Ottoman bridges, because nothing that looked like Stara Ćuprija existed in Europe before the Ottoman century.

You can forgive the legend-peddlers for one reason: for most of the 20th century, nobody knew where to look for the real answer. Then in the 1920s, a chronicler named Mehmedi Enver Kadić actually walked onto the bridge and read the inscription carved into the central span.

What the inscription says

The stone plaque at the middle of the bridge — you can still see it when you cross — carries a single line of Ottoman Turkish: Sene 1093. The year 1093 of the Islamic calendar. That’s 1682 in the Julian calendar.

Kadić noted it in his Hronika, a handwritten manuscript from 1926 now kept at the Gazi Husrev-beg Library in Sarajevo. Ten years later, the Konjic schoolteacher and local historian Alija Nametak confirmed the inscription with his own eyes during a 1939 visit. Kasim Gujić visited the next year and agreed — it’s the construction date, not a repair date.

So: 1682. Not the 11th century. Not 1715. Not some vague “Turkish time.” A specific year, carved into the bridge, and visible for three hundred years to anyone who looked.

The harder question was who.

The document chain

Here’s what we now know, in the order the evidence was discovered:

1935 — the oral tradition. A teacher named Husein Đogo wrote down a story told to him in Konjic by one Ahmet-aga Hadžizukić. According to Hadžizukić, the bridge was built by Haseći Ali-aga — a high-ranking officer at the Sultan’s court in Istanbul. Đogo published the account in a modest local journal. Nametak, who read it in 1939, didn’t quite believe it.

1961 — a second witness. The Belgrade historian Vojislav Bogićević published the family memoirs of Mehmedi Faik Alagić, a 19th-century Konjic Ottoman administrator. Deep inside those memoirs, Alagić records a story his father Mehmed had told him: that the bridge was built by Haseći Ali-aga, a senior official in Istanbul who was from Blagaj — the village at the source of the Buna, twenty minutes south of Mostar. Two independent oral traditions, sixty years apart, naming the same man.

But oral tradition isn’t proof. The smoking gun arrived in two pieces in the late 1970s.

1976 — the berat. The Bosnian historian Alija Bejtić, working through Ottoman registers archived in Istanbul, found a document from 1775. A berat — an imperial appointment decree — issued by Sultan Abdul-Hamid I on 4 Šaban 1189 AH (10 October 1775). The document appoints a new manager (mütevelli) for a religious endowment in Konjic. It reads, in translation: “Haseći Ali-aga erected [bena eyeldi] the bridge in the town of Konjic, and for its maintenance he endowed a coffee-house and two shops. The position of manager of this endowment is vacant, and needs to be filled. On the recommendation of the deputy judge Alija, Ibrahim-halifa has been appointed.”

Bejtić published his paper — “Ko je podigao konjičku ćupriju” (“Who Built the Konjic Bridge”) — in the journal Pregled in 1976. Eight pages, one document, forty years of guesswork resolved.

1978 — the ferman. Two years after Bejtić’s paper, Hivzija Hasandedić was sifting through the Franciscan archive in Mostar. In a box of Ottoman-era decrees, he found a ferman issued by Sultan Mehmed IV in 1096 AH (1684/85). The villagers of Glavatičevo — the settlement upstream of Konjic, on the way to Kalinovik — had petitioned the Sultan to repair or replace their wooden bridge on the Neretva. The Sultan refused. His reasoning: “Since a newly-built bridge is now in the town of Belgraddžik, built by Haseći Ali-aga, a second bridge is not needed.”

“Belgraddžik” — “little Belgrade” — was Konjic’s Ottoman name. Sultan Mehmed IV, writing in 1684, called Haseći Ali-aga’s bridge newly-built. That’s two and three years after the 1682 inscription on the bridge itself. The math is perfect. One document from 1684 and another from 1775, separated by ninety years and two archives on different continents, agree on the same man.

Who Haseći Ali-aga actually was

“Haseći” — often spelled Hasečić in Bosnian sources and Haseçiç in Turkish ones — isn’t a family name. It’s a military rank. Bejtić traced it: a hasečija was the commander of one orta, or battalion, of the imperial janissary corps at the Istanbul palace. Four hasečije served as the Sultan’s personal bodyguards when he rode out — two on his right, two on his left. It was a position of extraordinary trust.

The man’s family name was Kolaković. He came from Blagaj, the village at the Buna source. He had a son, Mehmed, who later became kadi — judge — of the Blagaj kadiluk. Local tradition places his grave somewhere near the Buna. He never lived in Konjic; he lived in Istanbul, at court, and endowed a stone bridge five hundred kilometers from the palace where he worked.

This is why Turkish sources call him “Blagaylı Hacı Ali Ağa Kolakoviç” and Bosnian sources call him “Ali-aga Hasečić.” Both are right. They’re describing the same man with different naming conventions — Turkish writers use his place of origin and family name, Bosnian writers use his rank and personal name. For most of the last century, translators assumed these were two different candidate patrons. They weren’t.

The forgotten predecessor — a wooden bridge for seventy years

One detail that almost nobody writes about: Haseći Ali-aga’s stone bridge wasn’t the first Konjic bridge. It wasn’t even the second.

When the Ottomans captured Konjic in 1465, they found a wooden bridge already in place, positioned about thirty meters downstream from where the stone bridge stands today. They either reinforced it or rebuilt it in wood.

In May 1612, a Mostar notable named Hacı Bali bin Mehmed endowed a new wooden bridge at the same spot. His endowment deed (vakufnama) is preserved in the Gazi Husrev-beg Library in Sarajevo, collection number 168. It specifies that Hacı Bali built, at his own cost, “a bridge without equal” over the Neretva in Konjic, along with a second bridge upstream at Glavatičevo, a caravanserai in the Burka district, and a mosque and school in Mostar. The entire system was funded by nine rented shops in Konjic and a 300,000-akçe cash endowment. Konjic’s bridge was paying for a Mostar mosque — three hundred years before any of us started calling this the “Mostar–Konjic axis.”

Evliya Çelebi, the great Ottoman travel writer, came through Konjic in 1664. His Seyahatname describes the crossing: “The water is crossed by way of a large wooden bridge.” Confirmation from a contemporary eyewitness that as late as the 1660s, Konjic’s bridge was still wood.

Then, five years after Çelebi passed through, the bridge fell. On the interior wall of the old Djevojačka Džamija — the Maidens’ Mosque, which stood in Konjic’s old town until 1946 — a handwritten inscription recorded the event: “In the year 1071, at the beginning of the month Rebiülevvel, the bridge in Konjic was brought down — let it not be forgotten.” That’s March 1659. The likely cause: a Neretva flood. A replacement wooden bridge was built immediately on the same downstream site.

It was that makeshift wooden bridge that Haseći Ali-aga’s stone Stara Ćuprija replaced in 1682 — but not at the same site. He built the stone bridge thirty meters upstream, at a slightly different crossing. The old wooden bridge may have continued in use for pedestrians for some years afterward; its timber remains were still visible in the Neretva as late as the 1930s, and Mulić — the Konjic historian who pieced all of this together — remembers grabbing onto them as a kid while swimming downriver.

The twin bridge you’ve probably never heard of

Here’s something that almost nobody mentions. Stara Ćuprija has an identical twin — in Serbia.

The Kasapčića most in Užice was built in 1627/1628 by a local notable named Mehmed-beg Kasapčić, fifty-four years before Haseći Ali-aga started his stone span in Konjic. Evliya Çelebi saw it too, on another trip, and was so struck by the resemblance that he wrote down its construction inscription word for word. The design is the same — six pointed arches, progressively wider toward the center, tenelija limestone, breakwater piers, the lot. The Konjic historian Mulić argues the same architect, or the same workshop tradition, designed both.

If that’s right — and the visual match makes it very hard to argue otherwise — Stara Ćuprija isn’t a one-off. It’s one of two surviving examples of a distinctive late-17th-century Ottoman bridge type that crossed borders the way Ottoman patronage crossed borders: Istanbul financed, local-workshop executed, repeated wherever a strategic crossing and a connected patron coincided.

And there may be a third. Mulić records a story in his own article — a colleague at the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo told him her father had visited Albania before World War II and sent home a postcard showing an identical bridge. The postcard was lost. Mulić intended to track down the Albanian location. He never did. It’s a genuine open question, sitting quietly in Bosnian scholarly memory. Whoever finds it would be adding to the record.

3 March 1945 — what it took to destroy a bridge

On the afternoon of 3 March 1945, the bridge had a few last crossings. Ibrahim efendija Hadžizukić — a trader whose shop was directly opposite the bridge on the left bank — walked across at about five in the evening, heading home to his house in the Okuka neighborhood. Salih-Salko Fejzagić, the cashier at the local locomotive depot, had crossed just minutes before. A small handful of civilians were the last Konjicans to walk on the original stone deck.

Between 17:00 and 19:00, Hadžizukić heard “a strong detonation.” He understood immediately what it was.

The order to destroy the bridge came from the XXIX Herzegovina Strike Division under Major-General Vlado Šegrt. The Germans had mined the deck to block the Yugoslav Army’s advance toward Sarajevo; the bombs had already taken out one section of the deck between the second and third piers, but foot-traffic was still possible across a narrow remnant. The Partisan engineers finished the job.

Mulić, writing from personal memory — he was a child in Konjic that day, in the cellar of a neighbor’s house serving as a shelter — records a detail most accounts skip. Alternative technical solutions existed: reinforcing the damaged deck with steel or timber braces, or tying a pontoon deck to the surviving piers. None was attempted. “Apparently,” he writes, “everything Turkish had to be destroyed.”

Five piers survived. A makeshift iron-and-wood deck went up on top of them and carried traffic for the next sixty-four years. A child born in Konjic in 1940 didn’t see the real Stara Ćuprija until 2009, when the current bridge — rebuilt stone by stone between 2005 and 2009 by the Turkish construction company ER-BU, with funding from TİKA — finally reopened on the evening of 17 June.

When you visit

Walk the bridge from the left bank, the old-town side. Stop at the center span and look up — the Sene 1093 inscription is still there, small and easy to miss. Look downstream: about thirty meters below, where the river bends slightly, is where Hacı Bali's 1612 wooden bridge and all its predecessors stood. Look at the central pier's upstream face — the two-step projecting balcony that Mulić calls an astak is a signature of this bridge type, one you won't find on Mostar's famous Stari Most. Look at the keystones of the arches: the pale limestone is original, recovered where possible and recut from the same Konjic-area quarry where possible. Most of what you're touching is new, but the piers under your feet are the piers Haseći Ali-aga's workers set in 1682.

And if you want the bridge you're standing on to mean something more than a pretty photo: walk across it once thinking about a janissary commander from Blagaj who spent his career in Istanbul and sent his money home to build something a whole town could use. Walk across it again thinking about Ibrahim Hadžizukić at five in the afternoon on the last day of that bridge's 263-year life, not knowing it. Walk across it a third time thinking about the Albanian postcard that's probably still out there somewhere, waiting for someone to find it.

Then, when you've had enough walking, don't walk it again. Sit down at one of the small cafés on the old-town bank — the kind where the tables back up to the stone wall above the water. Order a Turkish coffee; they'll bring it in a little cezve with a sugar cube on the saucer and a glass of water alongside. The Neretva under the arches is that particular milky green you don't quite believe is real until you're looking at it, and the piers of Haseći Ali-aga's bridge rise out of it twenty meters from your table. This is maybe the best thing you can do about the bridge — not photograph it, not read another plaque, just sit next to it with a cezve and an hour. The stones in front of you look exactly the way they do because three centuries of Konjicans have spent afternoons doing the same thing.

Konjic's a town that takes two or three days to see properly. The bridge is one reason. If you're planning a visit, check what else is in town — the bunker thirty minutes up the road is the other one most people come for, and the Neretva rafting downstream is the third. Ask us about putting the weekend together — I can tell you what to skip and what's worth the extra day.

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Sources used in this piece:

Dr. Jusuf Mulić, “Mostovi na Neretvi u Konjicu” (Medžlis IZ Konjic, 2021 republication of his 2001 chapter in Konjic i njegova okolina u vrijeme osmanske vladavine, 1463-1878). The single most complete scholarly account.

Alija Bejtić, “Ko je podigao konjičku ćupriju,” Pregled XLVII (1976), 7-8, pp. 847-852. The paper that ended the attribution dispute.

Hivzija Hasandedić, “Nekoliko novih podataka o kamenom mostu u Konjicu,” Most V (1978), 19-20, pp. 117-121. The 1684/85 ferman publication.

Hacı Bali bin Mehmed vakufnama, 2-11 May 1612, Gazi Husrev-begova biblioteka Sarajevo, collection #168; transcribed and translated in Bosna-Hersek Vakfiyeleri Vol. 2, pp. 573-580, Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü, Ankara.

1775 berat of Sultan Abdul-Hamid I, Arhiv Generalne direkcije vakufa, Istanbul, Ruznamče defter No. 1171, p. 214; photocopy at Orijentalni institut Sarajevo, #36-315.

1684/85 ferman of Sultan Mehmed IV, Acta turcarum IV/294, Arhiv Hercegovačke franjevačke provincije, Mostar.

Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname (1664 Konjic description), p. 470 in the 1959 Sarajevo edition.