Just Another Day in Visegrad: Andric Lives, Andricgrad Struggling

Can Visegrad be mentioned without everybody thinking about Andric? Just like Muslims have Mecca and Medina, and Christians their Jerusalem, those who appreciate the work of our only Nobel Prize winner have to visit, at least once in their lives, the place that is inseparable from Andric – Visegrad.

The pilgrimage to the town down whose streets the little Ivo used to run, soaking up its history and spirit, which he would later turn into the novel “The Bridge on the Drina”, is not difficult to organize. The city which is located at the far east of Republika Srpska, 16 km away from the Serbian border, and can be visited by tourists on Zlatibor or Tara, after slightly more than an hour’s drive. Those who want to avoid the seasonal traffic jams at the border and are willing to set aside RSD 3,000 for the ticket can take the boat from Perucac and enjoy the fantastically beautiful canyon of the Drina, and they stay in Visegrad for two and a half hours.

And when you enter the city, from a boat or a car, not a train – although the famous “Cira” started transporting passengers from Mokra Gora last year, this year, unfortunately, it doesn’t operate the route – Andric will welcome you.

Lotikas and Anikas are at every corner – they have jumped out of Andric’s pages into the names of patisseries, barbecue places, restaurants, cafes and small boats. The writer is everywhere, on fridge magnets, trays, T-shirts.

Tourism workers are everywhere as well, stopping you while you walk, offering a 30-minute boat sail for EUR 6 or a train ride for EUR 5. Those with experience say that bargaining pays off, but those who find that practice foreign to them can take a free walk to the first point of the pilgrimage.

A piece of advice: The official currency is the convertible mark, but everything can also be paid in dinars and euros. Still, it’s better to pay in euros, because the exchange rate at various facilities varies and even goes up to RSD 140 for one euro. Although the attractions are not cheap, the food is, so a portion of the “cevapi s kajmakom” dish (grilled minced meat with clotted cream) costs EUR 3 in a restaurant, a trout costs EUR 4.5, and an espresso costs 90 eurocents.

The Bridge on the Drina – To Live Forever

“We all die once, and great people die twice: the first time when they are no more, and the second when their legacy goes to ruin” – if Andric is right, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha has not died for the second time. His legacy, the famous bridge on the Drina, built in the 16th century as a piece of the most modern building technology at the time, still wins everybody over with its beauty.

The most famous attraction of Visegrad has been put on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The beauty of the bridge, 179.5 meters long, 6.3 meters wide and with 11 widely recognized arches, is best seen from the river after all. Boat cruising takes you beneath the arches, so you can admire this construction endeavor of the most famous architect of that time, Mimar Sinan, from up close. The protagonist of Andric’s novel is also the place of numerous legends, such as the one about the twins walled-in inside the bridge, Stoja and Ostoja. The bridge has suffered demolitions itself. However, it has never been torn down by either natural or human disasters, so there’s no reason not to believe Andric that it will last forever.

Andricgrad – What happened to a project of national importance?

The same cannot be said with certainty about Andricgrad, a complex built on the confluence of the Rzav and the Drina, which opened to visitors in 2012. This stone town is inspired by the works of Ivo Andric, and the man behind the idea is Emir Kusturica. It has been announced as a project of national importance which will finally establish Visegrad as a major highlight on the tourism map of the region. This, however, has not happened.



Although various languages can be heard in the streets named after Francisco Goya, Thomas Mann and Young Bosnia, the situation is far from the crowding that we are used to in popular summer destinations. Plenty of outlets within the complex are empty and it is unusually easy to find a place in a café, even in August, which is peak season. The Church of Saint Prince Lazar, a replica of the Decani Monastery, built in a record 65 days, is half-empty as well.

As soon as you divert from the main route, in order to see a mixture of styles, from the Byzantine through the Ottoman, to the renaissance style, you will run into the ghostly empty parts of the complex within which there are a cinema, a bookstore, the town house and a gallery.

There’s also a hotel with 11 arches, imitating the bridge. It has not even started working yet, and there are already the first visible signs of dilapidation, dried out wooden elements which have changed color due to lack of care and maintenance.

Andricgrad, at whose entrance you are welcomed by the monument showing an embrace of Sokollu Mehmed Pasha’s cousins and Patriarch Makarije, as a symbol of brotherly love which is stronger than all divisions, seems not to have succeeded in its intent.



Since Kusturica is no longer in charge (he now has only 21.8% of the ownership), the state, along with the city, has become the majority owner of the complex, whose name is no longer primarily synonymous with Andric, but divisions, scandals and mutual accusations between former partners. We don’t know what the one in whose name everything was done and whose monument, along with the busts of the greats Mesa Selimovic and Nikola Tesla, enriches the square, thinks. Andric is wisely keeping silent, but he did write down enough thoughts about human nature for us to be able to guess.

Andric house privately owned

The writer’s thoughts are also to be recalled when visiting the house where he spent his childhood. They yard, more precisely, because the house is privately owned, so the fans of Andric who want to see the rooms where this genius writer grew up will only be able to take a look at the exterior walls, instead of the planned heritage museum.



Whether Andric adhered to what he wrote: “the life strength of a man is measured by, among other things, his ability to forget”, or the injustice that the city did when it sold the house weighed on him, we don’t know. In that small ground-floor house on the left bank of the Drina, Andric lived with his aunt, Ana Matkovscik, who bequeathed the house to him. In 1953, the writer gifted the house to the city hoping that it would become part of the Cultural Center. Only a month later, the city sold the house to the Visegrad-based engine driver Muhamed Ploskic. The Municipality of Visegrad has tried to correct the mistake on several occasions and retake ownership of the house, but without success.

The engine driver’s inheritors, who live in Sweden, do not want to sell it. The rumor among the local populace is that they are asking an incredible price of EUR 1.5 million for it. So, instead of the expected and planned heritage museum, the house only has a table put up in 1976, saying: “The writer and Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric spent his childhood in this house”.

All that remains is for us to accept that everything passes, including gratitude, but that “that everything passes is not the worst thing, but that we cannot and don’t know how to deal with that simple and inevitable fact.” Or to optimistically believe that “it will all end well someday.”

M. Dedic

Ivo Andrić

Mimar Sinan

Emir Kusturica

Patriarch Makarije

river Drina

what to see in Višegrad

Andrićgrad

Kamengrad

The Bridge on the Drina

the bridge in Višegrad

Sokollu Mehmed Pasha bridge