Trebinje // A Cock and Balls Bridge
© John Bills
Okay, let’s not get too precious about this. After all, it is a bridge, right? It isn’t as if it was built to make Welshman gawp all those centuries later. It was built so that people could get from one side of the Trebišnjica river to the other, bringing communities together in the hope of increased trade and better communication. Community, communication, same root.
But, still, this is not your standard bridge. One of those can be found nearby, connecting old Trebinje with new Trebinje, although even that is a little disrespectful to the functional charm of the Kameni Most. Still, you don’t need to be an engineer to decipher which of these two bridges is the tourist attraction. It isn’t the one with cars on it, that’s for sure.
Known here as the Perović Bridge, the Arslanagić Bridge is a major piece of Ottoman-era architecture that stands head and shoulders above all in the modern age. Of course, that ‘head and shoulders’ comes with a ‘slightly outside the centre’ caveat, but it isn’t up to men to decide the course of rivers. Yes, dams exist, but that clearly isn’t the point. When this bridge was constructed in 1574, it was actually further away, but the construction of one of those aforementioned dams saw it flooded, dismantled, discarded. Then moved too, for fear of that description being a little too depressing.
© Shutterstock.com
Trebinje’s Ottoman crossover doesn’t carry the jaw-dropping power of Mostar’s, it doesn’t have the guile of the bridge found in Konjic, and it doesn’t have the literary reputation of Višegrad’s Bridge on the Drina. It doesn’t even have the abandoned fragility of the Ovčiji Brod near Nevesinje. All of this is true, but since when has the beauty of civil architecture been based on similar structures tens of miles away? Since never, that’s since when.
Besides, when the Arslanagić Most finally comes into view after a short stroll along the banks of the river, it brings its own mystique and charm. It is almost ungainly, not quite symmetrical, although that is the fault of the river and not the structure itself. It lumbers its way across the water, double-backed as much through pessimism and necessity. I once described it as a baby Brachiosaurus with its monolithic head submerged in water, and I guess that stands,
And yet, it is a beautiful piece of work. When Arslan-aga set up shop here and collected his toll in the 17th century, he must have spent his days marvelling at what a beautiful bridge he got to control. But then, as with all of history, how it may have looked to the famous toll collector is very different to how it looks to the four-eyed Welshman today. Besides, he may have been more interested in the toll the bridge brought in, as opposed to its aesthetic qualities.
© John Bills
And then, the cock and balls. I wandered onto the bridge to get a clearer look at the beautiful river below, to try and put myself in the shoes of the many who crossed the structure over the centuries. What was it I said? If walls could speak, they would have tales to tell, but if bridges could communicate they would keep us gripped for hours. Something like that, but honestly, I don’t wander onto the bridge to think of those stories. I wander onto the bridge to see if the cock and balls graffiti is still there. It is, of course. You are never more than 10 metres away from a hastily daubed cock and balls.
The childish graffiti doesn’t diminish the splendour of the bridge, and it never will. Those aesthetic qualities shimmer today as the bridge sits silently just outside the centre of Trebinje, still used as a way to cross this darling river in one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s most beautiful towns.
