Un Pont sur la Drina

This bridge was made famous by the novelist Ivo Andric. In his 1945 book “The Bridge on the Drina”, he told the painful history of a region near to the Bosnian village of Visegrad: “Visegrad’s bridge and inhabitants are so interlinked that it is impossible to tell their stories separately.” The image, infused with the river’s changing lights and showing the silhouettes of passers-by on the majestic stone bridge, carries a voice. It is the testimony of Poljo Mevsud, the inhabitant of a village 15 kilometres from Visegrad, given before the International Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia. He tells how, in September 2001, he pulled the corpses of massacred men and women from the river. “A bridge as a symbol, a pillory, a mausoleum, a testimony.”