The Old Bridge in Mostar will not be removed from UNESCO list of protected monuments, Miroslav Landeka, a spokesman for the Mostar City administration told Nezavisne Novine in an article published last week.
Landeka said that nobody knows what International Council for Monuments and Areas under UNESCO protection (ICOMOS) report will say, but he said that statements about the possible removal of Old Bridge from the list were ‘flippant’.
UNESCO experts visited Mostar and The Old Bridge on June 22 and 23. They met up with the city authorities but shunned journalists, according to Večernji list.
Last November, the Center for Investigative Reporting in Sarajevo (CIN) wrote about how the bridge’s listing was endangered because of the city’s failure to act on promises to protect and improve the city. Soon after that story, the city administration formed an agency to maintain the old city center. The city had agreed to a UNESCO demand for that agency, but had not acted previously.
