Mostar // Always Go Full Benefactor
© John Bills
Mostar has had quite the history. A redundant sentence, without doubt, but one that remains as true today as it did yesterday. There is a certain amount of grace afforded to cities that were developed rather than conquered, and Mostar is very much one of those. When the Ottomans entered these parts (wait, what…) in the 15th century, the city now known as Mostar was little more than a disparate collection of village houses on either side of the Neretva. The Ottomans came in, understood the potential of a settlement on this spot, and set to work. The knock-on effect was obvious, and the marauding empire was far happier to put time and effort into a city they had created, not one filled with angry conquered peoples. Trade, education, all that hot stuff.
Alas, such things don’t last forever, and the mess that was the 19th century Ottoman Empire is well-documented. By the time Mustafa Mujaga Komadina entered the world in 1839, Mostar was moving backwards, the empire was decaying, and the once-proud Ottomans were well on their way to the ‘rotting corpse’ nickname that would hound them until their demise. When Komadina was born, reform was coming.
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Mostar’s great 19th-century benefactor and 20th-century mayor was made by those reforms, but I dare say there will be plenty of lines drawn between the two. Either way, Komadina was born into a rapidly changing Mostar, be it the arrival of foreign consulates in the 1860s and 1870s or the slightly more profound change that would take place towards the end of that second decade.
By 1878, the Ottoman Empire was all set to lose Herzegovina. Nobody consulted the people of Mostar, obviously, and riots broke out around the city ahead of the inevitable Austro-Hungarian occupation. These weren’t namby-pamby riots either, they were full-on knives and anger skirmishes, riots that led to the murder of local mufti Mustafa Sidki Karabeg, ostensibly for refusing to declare a fatwa on the coming Europeans.
The pre-occupation noise was not insignificant, only for the Austro-Hungarians to find silence when they entered the city on August 4, 1878. Courage extended no further than the hypothetical, it seemed. Austria-Hungary was now in charge, and things were about to change.
© John Bills
This was the formative world of Mustafa Mujaga Komadina. The son of a saddler who worked extensively with the Ottoman Army, Komadina was afforded an excellent education that created a voracious reader and a polyglot, and wealth came with. Thus, this story winds its way to the reason for Mustafa Mujaga Komadina’s notoriety; plainly, he financed the building of Mostar.
Not literally, of course, but it was the future mayor who put his hands deep into his own pockets and paid for the construction of several modern buildings, creating an architectural jigsaw puzzle that still shines in the city today. His first foray into this world was decidedly more traditional, as Komadina paid for the building of a new musafirhana (guesthouse, basically) on what is now Titova ulica. The establishment of the town’s volunteer fire department came two years later before Komadina went full benefactor during the difficult winter of 1887. People were starving, the harvest was awful, things were looking bleak, but Komadina popped up with piles of wood and sacks of flour, ensuring that some people (at least) wouldn’t freeze or starve to death that winter. A Jesus move, obviously, but intentions matter little when it is the difference between life and death.
Komadina’s first forays into politics were relatively unsuccessful, although the use of the term ‘relatively’ there is somewhat superfluous. Eventually, things turned round, and in 1908 the man from the Carina neighbourhood became mayor. His campaign was helped to no end by the growing list of structures that he had helped finance, from the famous Gimnazija to Lučki Most.
Komadina’s run as mayor ended in 1918, although not before he famously brought his love of public baths to the city. There is a charming quote attributed to him at the opening of Mostar’s main bath, where Komadina supposedly opened the building by saying “here’s the bathhouse for those who have money. For those who don’t, here is the Neretva.”
© John Bills
I don’t know the legitimacy of the quote, but Komadina’s legacy is all over the city. Most visitors aren’t aware of it, no great surprise, but many of the city’s early 20th century buildings were created thanks to funds supplied by the son of a saddler from the east of town. Most ironically, one of the city’s most photographed destroyed buildings was his personal villa, a forever obliterated structure on the pedestrian walk from Španski trg to Rondo that has since been taken over by nature.
As for Komadina himself? He died in May 1925 and is buried in the garden of the Lakišić Mosque, a stone's throw from his beloved Gimnazija and the renovated Španski trg. He is rarely bothered, left to sleep in peace for all eternity.
