Do you know how one real place can be place from the book? How you can live in reality and literature in the same time? Where the characters are and where are you? Can you imagine one perfect sunny day, you are walking and singing and around you are crossing your favorite characters, speaking and spending time with you. What would you think? That you are losing your mind or that you are blessed?  

Ivo Andric, in front of a bridge  SOURCE 

   I want to show you one of those places, where the people are from the book and buildings are made from the words and stone, old thousands of years. I have to show you a place where nothing is in the present. Everything is in a fiction because this place is exists because of fiction made by one man. Actually, fiction of one man made a place because of fiction of another.  

People around them seemed like they are living centuries in that earth full of blood and myths, full of historical music hidden in theirs body and the mind.   

Beautiful view SOURCE

  Visegrad 

 I am talking about Visegrad, small city in Bosnia, South of Balkan. History of that place was inspiration for the famous Serbian writer Ivo Andric who got The Nobel Prize for his work, 1961. One of his the best works was about Visegrad, his people and history. Ivo Andric was born in Visegrad and finish there primary school. All his life in his own mind he took the happiness and sadness of that place.  

Every morning in his childhood, he was crossing a bridge on the Drina and that become his obsessive thought. He wrote about bridges like the most powerful symbol and motive.   

  From everything that a person raises and builds in his life, nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, the shades, they are more general than temples.  (Story about bridges)

Mural on the wall in Visegrad, Private photo SOURCE

  That bridge was symbol of his nation and symbol of his own personality. Bosnia was a land between West and East, he was living between Christians and Muslims. Those duality become determinated for his life and literature. Bridges was that: buildings that connect two worlds but anybody can know what is happening and what is in the other side. Bridge is like a life: unknow and large, just our, but with unfluence of anothers. Bridges do not connect just a space, they also connect a time and generations.  

His novel Bridge on the Drina is speaking about one bridge who become only connection of the people with the place where they are living. Time is crossing, generation are born, others are dad but he is still yang and nice. He is above as, a symbol of permanence. He exists to curb a space and the time.   

Private photo SOURCE

  Destinies of people in Visegrad are connected with that bridge, everything is happening because of him and everything in passing across him. He survived wars, soldiers, faiths, love and glory. He was there because nobody couldn’t live without him. Such is situation in the novel, but we can find that kind of situations in the reality too. Why the people are living, because of that bridge? Are that curse or a blessing? He usually was compared life and bridge like two symbols of the same thing:  

Life is incomprehensible miracle, because it always dissipates and rashes, yet it lasts and stands firm as    the "The Bridge on the Drina".  

Private photo SOURCE

  Andricgrad  

From the book of Ivo Andric raises one more city. That place exists in reality but in the same time it was project of imagination, imagination of one grate artist. Famous director Emir Kusturica is built city which reminds us of the space from Andric's book. We can find there places where his characters was living, houses are built that reminds us of Muslim and Orthodocs period from his novel.

 Everything is like there, a lot of stones and sentences about and from the time of a book. This city is trying to repeat, grate destiny of a novel, because nothing can be finished, everything has to live in millions of shapes.   

City of Andric SOURCE

  When you are crossing here, you have feeling that in every moment some character from the book would ask you something and your answer has to be like that you are living in his dimension of been.   People are speaking stories like from the book, its not because that is touristic destination, its because Andric wrote that book from the deep of his soul and there is hidden the sense of his nation. Lives are the same, because everything what happened has to be repeated again. 

People from Visegrad are doing that: madeing Andrics novel always young and beautiful. They testify about him with his own life.   

SOURCE

  Myths and legends 

A lot of myths and legend are spelling about this place. One of the most famous is about mythical creatures who are takeing care of the bridge or want to destroy them. There is a mythical story about construction of a bridge. He was built just in a moment when the people give the victim. Victims were two child. Story about victim, when a building is being built, is present in Serbian and Slavic mythology. Nothing can live if before something didn’t die. Bridge exists because people give him a blood. 

All those stories, you can read in Andrics novel. He wanted to show legends, in the soul of his nation.   

In front of record of construction time, Private photo SOURCE

  Those legends was built a bridge on the Drina and the destiny of that small city in Balkan. Sow, if you every come here, don’t be surprise if something ask you question that would be asked by the character of Andrics novel. 

Be ready to answer, you would know how, because all world in one place and we are the some people, connected with the bridge of a time.   

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