There are many things I remember about Bosnia in 1996, a year after the Dayton Accord brought that dreadful conflict to an end. But one of the things I remember most vividly is actually something I never saw – the glorious Stari Most that soared across the Neretva River at Mostar.

The Ottoman explorer Evliya Çelebi described the bridge as being “like a rainbow arch soaring up to the skies, extending from one cliff to the other… I have passed through 16 countries, but I have never seen such a high bridge. It is thrown from rock to rock as high as the sky.”

As I was leaving Bosnia, my friends in the European Community Monitoring Mission (often called the ice cream men because of their white uniforms) gave me a card that showed the Stari Most in its past glory. So in a way I did see it, I guess.