Suleiman the Magnificent ordered the bridge in 1557 to replace a precarious wooden suspension structure that hung on chains over the gorge. The Ottoman geographer Katip Celebi described the old crossing bluntly: it "swayed so much that people crossing it did so in mortal fear." Hayruddin, a student of the legendary architect Mimar Sinan, designed the replacement at a reported cost of 300,000 drams in silver. Construction took nine years, supervised by Karagoz Mehmet Bey, the Sultan's son-in-law and patron of Mostar's most important mosque. The bridge was completed between July 1566 and July 1567. Its single arch springs from limestone abutments carved into the cliffs, rising 24 meters above the river, 30 meters long and 4 meters wide. Two fortified towers -- Halebija to the northeast, Tara to the southwest -- guard either end. The 17th-century explorer Evliya Celebi wrote that it was "like a rainbow arch soaring up to the skies... thrown from rock to rock as high as the sky."

Mostar grew around the bridge, and the bridge defined Mostar. The city took its name from it. The bazaar quarter of Kujundziluk clustered at its approaches, Ottoman houses cascading down the steep banks of the Neretva on either side. The bridge connected not just geography but communities -- Croat and Bosniak neighborhoods that shared the crossing for centuries. By the time Yugoslavia began to fracture, Mostar was one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, its population split roughly between Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. The bridge was the architectural expression of that coexistence, a single elegant arch joining what politics would soon try to divide.

During the Croat-Bosniak War, Bosniak forces used the bridge as a supply line across the Neretva -- by then the last surviving river crossing in Mostar. Croatian Defence Council forces began shelling it in June 1993. On 8 November, an HVO tank on the heights above the city started firing directly at the structure. The bridge collapsed into the river on 9 November. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia would later determine the bridge was a legitimate military target given its military use, but many scholars assessed that its destruction represented something far beyond tactical calculation. The shelling of the old town center was widely viewed as deliberate destruction of cultural heritage -- an attempt to erase the symbol of connection between the communities the war was tearing apart. A Spanish military engineering unit assigned to UNPROFOR built a temporary replacement in just three days.

After the war, an international coalition formed to rebuild what had been destroyed. The World Bank, UNESCO, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, and the World Monuments Fund oversaw the reconstruction, funded by Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Croatia, and the Council of Europe Development Bank. Hungarian army divers descended into the Neretva to recover original stones from the riverbed, though most proved too damaged to reuse. New blocks of tenelia -- a fine-grained local limestone -- were quarried to match the original material. The reconstructed bridge was opened on 23 July 2004, nearly eleven years after its destruction. The first person to jump from the rebuilt bridge was Enej Kelecija, resuming a tradition of diving from the arch that had been formalized as a competition in 1968.

Today, young men dive from the bridge into the Neretva 24 meters below -- a tradition that has become a kind of secular pilgrimage. Since 2015, Stari Most has been a stop on the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series, professional athletes launching themselves from the same Ottoman stone that once made Evliya Celebi reach for metaphors about rainbows and skies. The bridge is again a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and tourists again pack the Kujundziluk bazaar at its approaches. A play called Old Bridge by Igor Memic premiered at London's Bush Theatre in 2021, exploring what the structure means to the people who grew up crossing it. The bridge has been rebuilt, but Mostar remains a divided city, its ethnic geography hardened by war. Stari Most arches over the Neretva as it has for centuries -- a statement about connection that the city beneath it is still working to fulfill.