Old Town panorama. The picture was taken from the minaret of Koski Mehmed Pasha Mosque , which is just opposite Stari Most ("The Old Bridge") looking on the same part of the Neretva river. Photo: Rizwan/WIkipedia Sarajevo (KNA) In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country’s most famous postcard motif is currently causing death threats. The university in Mostar actually wanted to advertise one of its seminars with a poster of the famous “Stari most” bridge and the historic city centre. However, the fact that an “artificial intelligence” (AI) used to generate the graphic apparently replaced the mosques in the background with churches is causing anger in the divided society.
The Faculty of Humanities in Mostar has been heavily criticised on social media in recent days. The background: some Bosnians want to recognise church steeples instead of minarets in the towering buildings on the poster. As there have now been death threats as well as insults, the university has decided to cancel the advertised summer seminar, as local media reported (Wednesday). The political dispute had become a “security problem”, they said.
Three decades after the Bosnian war, Mostar remains divided along ethnic and religious lines. The city’s famous landmark bridge was bombed by the Croatian army on 9 November 1993 and later rebuilt. In total, around 100,000 people died in the ethnic massacres between 1992 and 1995 in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina.