Mostar · BA

Sniper Tower

Sniper Tower stands at the edge of Mostar's reconstructed Old Town like an open wound the city never quite finished healing. Known officially as the Ljubljanska Banka building, this concrete block was once a branch of a Yugoslav-era bank. During the siege of Mostar in the early 1990s, it became the tallest structure on the city's western bank and served as a sniper's nest, its upper floors offering a direct line of sight across the Neretva River into the eastern half of the city. Around 2000 people died in Mostar during that conflict, and some of the shots that killed them came from this building. Today its facade is riddled with bullet holes that read like Braille for anyone who wants to understand what urban warfare actually looks like. You don't need to climb to the top to feel the weight of this place. Stand on the pavement across from it and look up. Every floor tells a story of what happened when a city turned on itself. Nearby buildings carry the same pockmarked evidence. This is Mostar's scar tissue, and it sits just a 15-minute walk from the celebrated Stari Most bridge and its rebuilt UNESCO perfection. The contrast between the two is what makes visiting the Sniper Tower so unsettling and so essential to understanding the full picture of this city.