Day 127: Trebinje

Aug 8 - Some wind this morning helps clear the smoke that hung so heavy last night. I go to Bingo Plus to gather some breakfast foods. We head north from our apartment and across the Trebišnjica River and into the compact ‘old town’.

The city is well laid out and the historical part nicely organized. There is a large park surrounding the imposing Church of the Transfiguration.

From here, through the old city gates and into the historical district. It takes a while to get a feel for it, as parts are buried in cafes and souvenir stores.

Though there is some mention of this area in the times of the Serbian Kingdom, and later the Bosnian Kingdom, the real construction was after the takeover of all of Herzegovina by the Ottomans in 1482.

The Serbs of the region rebelled repeatedly against the Ottomans, and after they left, against the Austro-Hungarian administration. After the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Trebinje was declared capital of the Serbian Autonomous Region of Herzegovina. Bosniaks were forcibly conscripted to fight against Bosnian forces, and many Bosniaks fled westward. The town was used as a base to attack Dubrovnik, which was shelled in 1991-92.

Visit the Museum of Herzegovina. Would like to have seen the Bosnian version of this, but that one was closed when we went to see it in Mostar. The Serbian version has plenty of material, from Roman tombs and statuary to ethnic Serb costumes and a detailed historical accounting of the region from the 15th to 20th Centuries.

In the Serbian telling of Herzegovina history, the original Slavs who became known as the Serbs pretty much fought against outside dominance from the 10th Century onwards. During Ottoman times, many retreated to the more inaccessible areas to avoid assimilation into the Ottoman system. Being under the Ottoman yoke included paying a ‘foreigner’ tax, which could only be avoided by converting to Islam (this taxation rule was used across the Ottoman Empire for centuries). There is also a claim that after 1878, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was keen to weaken the coherence of a Serbian state, fearing it would become to powerful to control. The natural western boundary of Serbian Herzegovina, which was the Neretva River (by Mostar), was shifted many kilometers east, thus depriving Serbs of that important trading route from the sea to the highlands.

There is a rainstorm, which helps greatly to bring down the temperature and clear the air of lingering smoke.