July 5^th

We started the day by having a long coffee (3 hours---which seems the norm here) with Amir and Marija, and then drove to shoot some video in an abandoned quarry, where the stones used for the rebuilding of the Mostar Bridge were taken from.

Then it was on to Blagaj, to visit an ancient Sufi monastery, a very sacred place for Musilms, by an enormous cave from where the river Buna flows. An interesting item we saw at this site was a copy of the proclamation made by the Ottoman Sultan in 1463 granting total religious freedom to the citizens of Bosnia. Muslims here are very proud of their tolerant tradition, and their version of Islam is quite liberal and completely removed from any fundamentalism. Later that afternoon, while taking another drive and shooting some more video by the lonely mountain roads, we realized, by noticing the many minarets protruding here and there in the landscape, that we were actually in a Muslim European country, something that many people have a very hard time envisioning, much less accepting as a possibility.

We finished the day by having dinner by the Neretva river, on the banks of the old Ottoman city, which looks amazingly just as it must have looked 500 years ago. It was built in a lush spot by a rushing river and its tributary waterfalls, creating a small labyrinth of caves, bridges, and secret gardens right out a miniature painting, or even like oriental landscapes depicted in many European renaissance religious paintings.