from Mostar to Sarajevo to Banjaluka...
Stolac is located in southern Herzegovina, approximately 40 km southeast of
Mostar. It is a quasi-mythical town. Nobel laureate Ivo Andric, author of “The
Bridge on the Drina,” once pointed out that “if God created the world anywhere,
then he created it in Stolac”. Its municipality was indeed one of the most significant
centers of Bosnian culture, and Bosnia and Herzegovina considered proposing
Stolac for the UNESCO list of mankind’s cultural heritage in the 1980s.
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Rabbi of Stolac

October 1st, 2002

Stolac — the name means “stool” in the South Slavic dialects - is a beautiful village on the river Bregava, which cuts through the bleak, limestone mountains of Hercegovina, about 20 miles southeast of Mostar, the region’s main city.

It is sacred to Bosnians of all faiths, and was proposed as an international cultural site by the Bosnian government. The village’s surroundings include a massive deposit at Radimilje of pre-Islamic Bosnian burial monuments, or stecci, of inconceivable value for the world Bosnia is a country with five historical

identities: Muslim, Sephardic, Serbian, Croatian, and Gypsy.
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Seeking the Sleepers

August 1st, 2002

1978

Students escaping the smog of Sarajevo, we stepped out into the little valley
town late in the afternoon. The driver snapped off the skirting pop-kolo, climbed
down the coach steps and headed cafewards. Quiet -flowering lime trees round
the square, the rush of a river over a weir.
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Your Eminence,

We regard the persistent endeavours of Don Rajko Markovic, parish priest in Stolac municipality, to affirm and maintain the effects of the crimes perpetrated against us through his demand that a church be built on the site of the Carsija mosque in Stolac, as an extreme form of threat to our human dignity and rights.
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THE DEATH of Franjo Tudjman, the president of Croatia, reported recently in
the Sentinel, was probably unnoticed by most of your readers. In spite of the
presence of many Croatian Americans in Santa Cruz County-particularly in the
Watsonville area and Croatia’s involvement in the Balkans war, most Santa Cruzans
and probably most Americans would be hard-pressed to find Croatia on the map.
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