When historian Dragan Markovina returned to Mostar, the city of his childhood, he found a place "that didn't look like itself", but not only because of the devastating traces of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s.
"What brought me up ideologically, in terms of life, what made the city shine, was gone," Markovina told the BBC in Serbian.
Instead of the "Yugoslavian, red city, which proudly emphasized that peculiarity", he came across a clearly delineated division that stretched along the central boulevard, the former front line, so that one side was occupied by majority Croats, and the other by Bosniak municipalities.
Even after the establishment of peace in 1995, the two communities remained divided - children studied according to separate programs, public companies only cared about "their own", and there were also two football clubs, Velež and Zrinjski.
In an attempt to overcome the divisions, Paddy Ashdown, then the international representative for Bosnia with high powers, decides that the city will get a new Status in order to "unify" it.
The new rules came into force on March 15, 2004, and, even though 20 years have passed, Štefica Galić thinks that "the city is still divided."
"You can't see the wall, but you keep banging your head against it," says the journalist and photographer.
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Today, Mostar is "both unique and divided", according to Markovina.
"Although today's Mostar is far from what it was before the war, it remains the only essentially multi-ethnic environment.
"For today's BiH, it is incredibly beautiful and different."
Lots of new and some old
For years, Markovina struggled with returning to his hometown.
When he came to it in the years after the war, he subconsciously thought of the conflict and the ruins.
"Even though there were cars and pedestrians passing by, when you see it, it was impossible not to think about the war," says Markovina.
"Everything that came with the war - nationalism and the idea that everything before was a lie, bothered me ideologically, because I was brought up uncritically in the spirit that the nation is not important, in addition to parents who were from mixed marriages".
The last one 1991 Yugoslav census showed that in Mostar there were about 43.000 Bosniaks and Croats, almost 24.000 Serbs and 12.768 who declared themselves Yugoslavs.
Na the last census from 2013, the ethnic picture is different - 51.000 Croats, about 46.000 Bosniaks, and 4.421 Serbs.
There were 83 Yugoslavs.
The war in Mostar originally broke out between Croats and Bosniaks, on the one hand, and Serbs, with the support of the then Yugoslav army, on the other.
Soon, the former joint army retreats, but the Croat and Bosniak sides start fighting.
In the shelling of the Croatian Defense Council, during the autumn of 1993, the most famous symbol of the city, the Old Bridge, was hit.
The bridge was rebuilt, but there are still many traces of the war on the streets of the city.
During the three and a half years of war, more than 2.500 people died in the city.
Before he returned in 2019, Markovina occasionally came to Mostar, but could not stay overnight for more than two days due to great "nervousness".
"I was in the war for a few months and that was enough to know what the sound of a shell is, and to have enough memory to know what the experience of war is.
"And then I realized that the only way to bring out the trauma is to face it. I pushed myself for a long time, but I'm glad I'm back," he says.
Now he says that in Mostar, "like any other urban environment, something has survived, and that there is much more continuity" than he thought.
Everyday life and jobs force people to go from one side to the other - in one part there is the police, in the other tax office, shopping centers.
"Bosniaks live in the eastern part of the city, which is Ottoman with a little bit of socialism.
"The western part, which is perceived as Croatian, is Austro-Hungarian and socialist, and a few thousand Croats and a few thousand Serbs live there.
"Of course, everyone knows what it would be good not to talk about in a certain part of the city, but besides that, no one alive will look at you," says Markovina.
'Young people don't know each other'
Štefica Galić has been living in Mostar since 2013.
She came from Ljubuški, where he is together with his wife Nedeljko Galić, saved many Bosniaks from the camps.
This 60-year-old woman describes herself as a "Yugoslav woman who loves all people regardless of their nationality".
Although there are no serious inter-ethnic incidents in Mostar, divisions are still there, he says.
He calls the gymnasium in the center, once on the front line, the "apartheid school".
On one floor, students study according to the Bosnian educational program, on the second according to the Croatian curriculum, while on the third floor there is an American international college.
"The children are separated, they don't have joint activities, they don't hang out. If they absorbed what they were told, and were not curious enough to look over the wall at what was happening on the other side, they became future party soldiers."
"That's the saddest thing because Mostar was never like that, it was a multinational, anti-fascist, multicultural city," he says.
The spirit of community has been preserved by the older generations, but there are no "such intimate relationships", and among the young there are also those who have never crossed over to the other side.
"There are also young people who call themselves children without surnames, they are either from mixed marriages or simply do not want to divide people.
"They go both ways, but they never say their last name," she claims.
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Everything is shared, even garbage
The new Statute of Mostar foresees election regulations that should guarantee that "no constituent people can rule Mostar alone". Ashdown said, who died in 2018.
"The main goal of the Statute was to create one, unified city of Mostar, without territorial divisions, one City Council with one president, and to form a single, multi-ethnic city administration with one mayor," says Aleksander Rotert, former deputy director of the Mostar Implementation Unit. at the Office of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Neither the Croatian nor the Bosniak side were satisfied with the proposal.
"Both sides had to give up something" in the end, says Alexander Rotert.
Rotert and his colleagues "had only 18 months to do a Herculean job" because "ten years of war and ethnic divisions cannot be overcome with a single decree."
"It was an incredibly successful achievement that only worked because the international community was determined and focused to get the job done, with us on the ground."
But political frictions lead to blockages and duplication of institutions, and since 2008 there have been no local elections, while from 2012 to 2020 the city council did not function.
There were two waterworks, two hospitals and several communal services, so Mostar at one point began to drown in garbage.
"Many city institutions remained ethnically divided, as was the case with municipal waste management companies.
"Under normal circumstances, garbage knows no ethnicity, but in Mostar this was the case," says Rotert.
The Croatian side appealed to the Constitutional Court due to the election regulations, claiming that, because a large number of Croats live in Mostar, the principle of "one man, one vote" should be followed.
The court accepted these arguments and ordered the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH to amend the State Election Law, and the City Council of Mostar to harmonize the Statute of the City with the Constitution of BiH.
In June 2020, Bosniak and Croat politicians reached an agreement that led to elections later that year.
The new Statute of the city has not yet been adopted.
However, in the previous two years, city companies were united, so there are no more problems with garbage.
More attention is paid to problems important to the everyday life of citizens, says Markovina.
"They removed the illegal kiosks, they started taking care of the rows of trees, someone cleaned the sewage in front of my building after 30 years, which no longer turns blue when it rains.
"But everything that was not protected as a cultural monument was destroyed in order to build shopping centers and residential buildings, so now we have the act of stealing public space".
Markovina says that "there was much more optimism and hope immediately after the war."
"People looked at the war as an anomaly, when some evil people came who killed and opened camps, and when that madness stopped, now normal life will return.
"That optimism has been overrun".
Only peace is needed
Local elections will be held in Mostar this year and Salem Marić, president of the Mostar City Council, says that his party, the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), expects to "retain the primacy of the strongest Bosniak party".
He is convinced that Mostar is less and less divided and says that "citizens live normally, communicate, work in both parts of the city".
"The divisions that one wants to see are not so pronounced in Mostar.
"When we have riots by fans and when it is said that it is political, that is not true, because you are witnessing that in bigger cities there are problems that are not on a national basis," he says.
Mario Kordić, the mayor of Mostar from the Croatian Democratic Union, did not respond to calls and messages from BBC journalists in Serbian.
Aleksander Rotert believes that Mostar is a "united city" that has a "bright future".
"It is one of the most beautiful cities in Southeast Europe with incredible economic potential.
"Tourism is booming, the international airport is reopening. Now is the time to bring more small and medium-sized businesses to the city," he believes.
More than economic progress, Štefica Galić emphasizes the need for peace and tolerance.
"We haven't even recovered from the war, and our politics is such that it constantly hangs over our heads that there might be another war."
"Citizens are fed up. We would like to live out what we have left, because they stole 30 years from us," she says.
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