Dayton Federalism & Post-War Catholic Pilgrimage Economy

Socialist Yugoslavia, its violent dissolution and the Dayton settlement.

1 chapter

1991 - 1995

As Yugoslavia disintegrated, Croats in Herzegovina declared the Croatian Community of Herzeg-Bosnia on 18 November 1991, with Grude as its effective administrative center and Mostar as its declared capital — then a war zone. The Bosnian Croat leadership, backed by Croatia's President Franjo Tuđman, pursued autonomy within a collapsing state, culminating in the 28 August 1993 proclamation of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia. On 9 November 1993, Croat forces destroyed the Stari Most, the 427-year-old Ottoman bridge that had symbolized Mostar's multicultural identity — a rupture that divided the city into east and west halves along the Neretva. In Posavina, the Croat-majority communities of Orašje and Odžak held a narrow corridor along the Sava river while much of the surrounding territory fell to Republika Srpska. The Dayton Agreement of December 1995 ended the fighting but cemented ethnic divisions into the constitutional structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina, creating the four Croat-majority cantons that define this region today.

1918 - 1991

Incorporated into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), Herzegovina's Croats navigated minority politics within a Serb-dominated state that alternately suppressed and accommodated their identity. The renaming of Duvno to Tomislavgrad in 1928 — after the medieval Croatian king allegedly crowned on Duvanjsko polje — was a royal gesture that Croats adopted as their own; communist authorities reversed it to Duvno in 1946, only for a 1990 referendum to restore it with 98.91% support. The Church of St. Peter and Paul in Mostar, run by the Franciscans at the foot of Hum Hill, served as a cultural anchor for the Catholic community through both royal and communist regimes. On 24 June 1981, six Croat teenagers in the village of Međugorje reported visions of the Virgin Mary — an event that would transform this rural parish into one of the world's most visited Catholic pilgrimage sites, even as Yugoslav authorities attempted to suppress it. The Franciscan Province of Herzegovina, headquartered at Široki Brijeg, remained the institutional backbone of Croat cultural and religious life throughout the Yugoslav period.

1878 - 1918

The Austro-Hungarian occupation of 1878 recast Herzegovina as a Habsburg colony, introducing railways, Moorish-Revival public buildings, and an aggressive Catholic revival. On Mostar's west bank, broad avenues and a European urban grid replaced Ottoman informal settlement, with the Gymnasium (1902), Landbank (1910), and City Bath (1914) blending Moorish decorative vocabularies with European planning ambitions. The Franciscan order seized the moment: the Friary of the Assumption at Široki Brijeg (1846–1849), the first Franciscan house rebuilt in Herzegovina after Ottoman destruction, became the headquarters of the newly autonomous Franciscan Province of Herzegovina and established a gymnasium and seminary in 1901. The Franciscan Museum at Humac, founded in 1884 as the oldest museum in Bosnia and Herzegovina, collected artifacts spanning from the Paleolithic to the modern era — a continuity vault for a regional identity that the Habsburgs were simultaneously reshaping. Railways connected the interior to the Adriatic at Ploče, and the Sarajevo–Ploče line still carries passengers through the Neretva valley.

1481 - 1878

The Ottoman conquest of Herzegovina, completed by 1481, transformed the region into a frontier sanjak where Islamic governance coexisted with Catholic communities sustained by Franciscan friars under Ottoman protection. The Stari Most (Old Bridge), built in 1566 by Mimar Hayruddin under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, became the defining architectural monument of Ottoman Mostar and the symbolic crossing point of the Neretva. At Blagaj, a tekke (dervish monastery) built around 1520 at the spectacular Buna river spring hosted Sufi zikr ceremonies that continue three nights weekly to this day. Počitelj expanded under Ottoman rule with a hammam, mosque, and the Gavran-captain tower overlooking the Neretva. The Franciscans, operating under a 15th-century Ottoman edict (ahdnama), became the custodians of Catholic identity — preserving the faith in an era when conversion to Islam carried social and economic advantages. The survival of Catholic parish life under Ottoman rule is the foundation on which all later Croat-Herzegovinian festival traditions rest.