Jablaniča—Mostar—Across the Mountains—The Balkan
Riviera—Ragusa: The Fairy City of the Adriatic.
From Sarajevo the narrow-gauge railway line makes a gradual ascent of the mountains, the engineer assuring the safety of himself and his passengers now and again by applying the rachet attachment, for the grades are very steep. Finally the divide is crossed a short while before the train reaches the picturesque little village of Konjiča, a meagre assortment of red-roofed, white-walled houses, including the inevitable mosque tower, literally dumped in among the green hills with pleasing effect.
A GORGE OF THE NARENTA, NEAR JABLANIČA.
Farther along at Jablaniča—where, although a village of but two hundred souls, the accommodations of a good hotel beckon to the traveller to spend some time in this vicinity, should the grandeur of the surrounding mountain scenery appeal to him as it did to us—a gorge of the Narenta is crossed and from this point the line follows the defile of the river as far as Mostar. A military road of stone foundation, which would tempt the most apprehensive of automobile tourists, twines itself, like a white thread, along the opposite side of the river from the railway, now bridging with stone arches the waterfall of a mountain stream at its debouchment into the river below, now circling the base of an overhanging cliff, now shooting into a short tunnel blasted through the solid rock. A wall of stone masonry borders the outer edge of the road at the dangerous places.
While the adjacent mountains are wild, rugged and severe in their bleakness, the valleys between them are fertile and productive. Almost any cereal which thrives in temperate latitudes grows readily. Indeed, in travelling through Bosnia to-day the farms of prosperous land-owners so stretch themselves across the undulating sections of country between the higher mountain ranges that the observer might easily imagine himself circling a great agricultural section of England or America.
Jablaniča is a much-patronized summer resort for the people of both Sarajevo and Mostar, and from it as a starting-point climbing excursions into the mountains may be made in every direction. Responsible guides will be supplied at the hotel for comparatively small sums. The air here is delightfully clear and invigorating; even on the warmest days the cooling shade of the extensive gardens which surround the hotel is much too enticing to allow one to hurry along to Mostar. As a quiet, charming place to recuperate, for as long a time as you will, from the fatigues of travel in the Balkans, I can suggest a no more convenient, or a no more fascinating spot than right here at the hotel in this diminutive village of Jablaniča. If you do not care to climb mountains you may revel in a general rest, for a few days at least. Even the name of the place requires no special lingual effort to pronounce, once you become familiar with these Slavonic combinations; you merely have to say “Yab-lā-nitz-ā”—it just sort of rolls along your tongue from the palate to the lips, and then drops.
In Mostar, the capital of the Herzegovina, the sewing-machine advertisements offer about the only hint that you are living in the twentieth century, for this city seems to have adhered more closely to mediæval methods than any in the Balkans.
The Narenta River, which divides the town, is a shallow mountain stream at times, but after a period of heavy rains it surges down through the mountain gorges and over the grotesque lavic rocks, ripping away its banks and necessitating the inhabitants of the town whose homes border its scaly sides to build their houses upon stilts.
Mostar may boast of, or bemoan, as the case may be, a collection of thirty mosques, for, of its fourteen thousand population, half are Mohammedans, and two thousand of the remaining half comprise the troops of an Austria-Hungarian garrison. The streets of the town are dirty and narrow, and the sun beats down between the white walls of the houses as if in the tropics. A bridge of modern steel construction spans the Narenta just near the hotel of that name, while half a mile farther down the river one of the most famous bridges in all Europe stretches its single arch out of the shadows across the sea-blue water of the Narenta, which gurgles in and out among the volcanic boulders ninety feet below the key-stone. The age of this bridge is indeterminable. It is supposed to have been built by the Cæsars at a time when the Herzegovina was a Roman province. Be that as it may, nothing like its construction or architecture is to be seen in bridge-building in Europe, no matter how ancient or how modern, and it is still used by market-people and the inhabitants of that quarter of the city. One would almost expect to see a centurion or two, in togas and sandals, walk out across the old structure any minute.