My affinity for bridges began when I saw a 400 year bridge in Herzegovina. Battered and missing bits of parapet, the old bridge at Mostar was wearing an improvised wooden bonnet in an ultimately futile attempt to ward off artillery rounds. “Bridges are products of peace”, I wrote "...connective tissues that in war become the most vulnerable supply routes.”
But the first and last word about bridges may well have been penned by the Nobel Prize winning Yugoslav writer Ivo Andric:
Everywhere there is something to overcome or to bridge: disorder, death, meaninglessness. Everything is a transition, a bridge whose ends are lost in infinity, besides which all the bridges of this earth are only children’s toys, pale symbols. And all our hope lies on the other side.
