Quote by Ivo Andrić: “Of all that man erects and builds in his urge for living, nothing is greater than bridges.”

Buildings shelter you from the world; walls keep others out. But a bridge spans the gap between two separate things and invites movement between them. For Andrić, a bridge is the supreme human creation because it embodies the essential human desire not to stay fixed and separate but to connect, cross, and reach the other side.

Andrić published The Bridge on the Drina in 1945, the year the Second World War ended in Europe and Yugoslavia was reconstituted as a communist federation under Tito. The novel traces the history of a stone bridge in the Bosnian town of Višegrad across four centuries of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule. The bridge becomes a metaphor for human continuity amid violence.

Bosnian-Yugoslav novelist and diplomat who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961, the only author from the former Yugoslavia to do so. His novel The Bridge on the Drina is an epic spanning four centuries of life in Bosnia. His work explored the long history of conflict and coexistence between the peoples of the Balkans.