In the duchy of the wine

While Dalmatia's coastline is rocky and barren its hinterland is more green and with a rich vegetation. This land is called the Herzegovina. (The name comes from "Herzog" the German word for duke and the wine (vina) that is grown there.)
For this journey Thievery Corporation's From Creation fits perfectly.

At the bus station in Split I met a nice girl and joined her for the days in and around Mostar. At first I wanted to make only only a city tour through Mostar and perhaps to climb a mountain there but she persuaded me to join a full day trip through the Herzegovina. And this was a very good idea! We first drove to the Vrelo Bune where we got breakfast directly at the Buna river. We we served delicious Bosnian burek which is not really comparable to the Börek as we know it in Germany - it tastes so much better. We also visited the Blagaj tekke which is right above the source of the Buna river - with about 40000 liters per second one of the strongest sources in Europe. The tekke is a holy site for the Muslims and in May thousands of them visit this place in a pilgrimage.

The Buna.

View towards the source of the Buna. The bridge has an age of 600 years.

 

Bosnian burek. To the left the original variant with meat and to the right the variant filled with cheese.

Bureks are baked using hot stone for the bottom and a "hat" for the top. The hat is filled with ember.

Inside the tekke woman have to cover their hair, shoulders and knees and of course everybody has to take of the shoes.

The second stop was at the castle of Počitelj close to the border to Croatia.We were there guests of a family living in one of the many buildings of this castle. The mother of the family has been in Germany during the Bosnian war like many, many Bosnians as I will explain in another post. She asked me reproachful why Germans are not visiting Bosnia but are flooding Dalmatia (where German is de facto the third official language). Germany has helped Bosnia a lot the last years and it would help the country if also some tourists would come.
The castle itself is not that impressive although it is UNESCO world heritage. Maybe because it was raining the whole time (the first rain there since 2 months!) and because the museum, church and the mosque was closed. However, the valley of the Neretva is so impressive that climbing the castle's tower was absolutely worth it.

The castle was erected by the Ottomans and became important when the Venetians occupied the Dalmatia's coastline.

View from the castle over the Neretva valley.

In the Počitelj castle I saw for the first time a pomegranade tree.

The third stop was at the Kravice waterfall. Despite the rain we had more than 30 °C and jumping into the waterfall was really refreshing. Climbing in a waterfall is amazing and our guides safely guided us through it. Of course one needs to be fit but we were group of only young people.We also jumped from a rock and climbed behind the waterfronts - wonderful.

The Kravice waterfall of the Trebižat river. We jumped from that rock which is in the middle  and slightly to the right in the picture.

The fourth and final stop was in Međugorje, a pilgrim's town for catholics. It is quite huge and is a conglomerate of concrete hotels. The main church is quite unadorned compared to other pilgrim's churches. The only impressive thing there was a house with many small cabins. Each of them is reserved for a certain language so that the pilgrims can there talk to a priest in their language. As Međugorje is crowded, people have to wait for hours until they can speak to a priest and as there are not enough rooms, some priests have to place their table outside the house. However, pilgrim's places will forever be dubious to me.

The mentioned house in Međugorje where people can speak to a priest in small cabins.

All in all it was a nice mixture of culture and nature as I like it. Especially the landscape impressed me. At this time I could not know that in the north of the Herzegovina it is even more impressive as you will see in my next post.

View over the Neretva valley towards Mostar.