The Broken Span

Most ruins are an accident — a place that fell down because nobody kept it up. This one is the opposite. The bridge over the Neretva at Jablanica is broken because somebody meant it to be.

The story, as I’d read it before coming, is from the worst winter of the war. A column in retreat, thousands of wounded among them, pinned against the river with the gorge at their backs. The order was to drop the bridge — make it look like there was no way across here, then cross anyway over the wreck of it. It worked. And then, instead of rebuilding, they left the broken span exactly where it fell. A monument that is also the thing itself.

You come down to it on a bright summer day and the violence of the idea sits very strangely against the setting. The Neretva here is the most absurd green — emerald, almost lit from underneath — running fast and cold through a gorge with mountains stacked up behind. And out over it hangs this length of steel railway bridge, cut clean and dropped, the truss buckling down toward the water and stopping just short. Beautiful and brutal in the same glance.

They didn’t fail to keep this bridge standing. They brought it down on purpose — and then left it broken, exactly where it fell.

I walked out as far as the deck lets you and looked straight down the line of it into the river. There’s an old black steam locomotive parked back by the rails, red-wheeled, the kind that would have hauled a column like that, kept now the way the bridge is kept — not running, not scrapped, just held in place. The whole site has that quality. Nothing is being used and nothing is being allowed to disappear.

Kept, not abandoned

It’s a strange one for a list like mine. Most of what I photograph is abandoned in the true sense — forgotten, unguarded, going down on its own clock. This was abandoned deliberately and then guarded ever since, which is almost the reverse. But standing on it, the feeling is the same one I chase everywhere else: a piece of the most violent decade there’s ever been, gone quiet, with a green river running underneath it that does not care in the slightest.

The river is the part that stays with me. The bridge is the human thing — built, broken, kept, remembered. The Neretva just keeps running through the gap where the span used to meet, the way it did before any of it and the way it will long after.