Friday, 16 April (continued). Having finished our last minute
shopping, we checked out of the hotel and headed north and west to Visoko, Bosnia's oldest city and once its capital. The ruins of an old fortress
(originally 13th century?) loomed over the town. It was after 12:00 when we
got there. This was supposed to be a great town for buying leather goods. We
looked in a few shops but we didn't
find anything we wanted. We ate lunch along the river a short distance out of
town.
The road was terrible, very rough, buckled by frost, narrow, and crowded with big trucks. There wasn't room for us to stay on the paved portion of the road when we passed trucks going in the opposite direction, which was almost always. On the other hand, the area was very picturesque because it was so primitive. There were many Bosnian peasants along the road in colorful or all white costumes. There were small horses loaded with hay, ancient-looking carts and wagons, and shepherds tending flocks of sheep. (Not wanting to stop to ask permission to take pictures, due to constraints of both time and language, we took them through the car windows, usually without stopping.)
We passed through Travnik, an old Turkish mountain town with a large fortress, and stopped briefly to take pictures. After that, we saw many old Turkish watermills still in operation. (There is a more detailed description of their operation below.) At one especially pretty spot, I stopped to take a picture of a mill, and three young Bosnian girls ran and stood in front of it to get on the picture. They shouted, laughed and waved until we finally drove off. Not long after, we reached Jajce, our day's destination, and checked into the Tourist Hotel where we'd made a reservation. No one spoke any language we knew, but we still managed to check in. We appeared to be the only guests there and, in fact, the only tourists in town. The three double rooms with bath were $5.00 each.
Jajce lies at the confluence of the Pliva and Vrbas
Rivers. An old walled town with a citadel that dates back to the 13th century,
it
was once the capital of Bosnia. The last King of Bosnia was executed here by the
Ottoman Turks in 1463. It's most recent claim to fame is as the site of Marshal
Tito's proclamation of his new "democratic" government for Yugoslavia in
November 1943 while the Germans still occupied most of the country.
We took a quick drive into the mountains behind the town to see the old Turkish watermills on the falls. They were pretty much in ruins, but one was in operation, apparently just to show people how they worked. One end of a long wooden tube, about six inches in diameter, was swung into the falls, and the water it caught was directed onto a paddlewheel that turned the shaft that turned a millstone.
After a brief stop at an old gate through the wall, we drove back and parked at the hotel, then walked through the
town. It was dominated by the large fort (most recently rebuilt by Turks in the16th century) and the
remains of the venerable
St. Mary's Church, but neither was open. The Church's bell tower (built in 1461,
long after the church) was called St. Luke's, and later people started calling
the church St. Luke's, too.
The tower is a rare example of Romanesque architecture in Bosnia and the only original
medieval Church tower on the entire Balkan peninsula.
Next we walked to the beautiful Pliva Falls, 100-foot high and very wide. We had seen the falls briefly as we crossed the bridge into the city. We made our way to the bottom of the falls where the boys let off a little energy playing on the rocks. It was dusk by then, but the weather was still quite pleasant. We walked back to the hotel for dinner (another adventure with the language barrier), then went to bed.
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