Bosnia and Herzegovina P-12 50 dinara 1992 XF | Dževad Hozo

You will receive a banknote of the design indicated in Extra Fine condition. 

Front: guillochet design by renowned Yugoslav and Bosnian designer Dževad Hozo

Back: Stari Most – The Old Bridge of Mostar (UNESCO World Heritage site)

Watermark: repeating diamonds

Stari Most – The Old Bridge of Mostar 
Stone, arc, and memory suspended over the Neretva.

Built in 1566 under Sultan Süleiman the Magnificent by the Ottoman architect Mimar Hayruddin, Stari Most was an engineering poem: a single, impossibly elegant limestone arch leaping 29 meters across a jade-green gorge. No piers, no clutter—just pure curve, as if drawn with a compass by God.

For centuries it linked not only the two banks of the Neretva, but two worlds: Muslim and Christian quarters, East and West, caravan and cathedral. Young men proved their courage by diving from its crest into the icy river below, a ritual of passage and bravado that still continues.

In 1993, during the Bosnian War, Croat artillery deliberately destroyed it. The collapse was televised: a 427-year-old bridge dissolving into the river, a civilization’s connective tissue severed in real time. The world understood instantly—this was not just military damage, but cultural assassination.

Rebuilt stone by stone and reopened in 2004, using original Ottoman techniques and salvaged blocks dredged from the river, Stari Most became a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a symbol of something rarer than victory: restoration without erasure.

The Designer: Dževad Hozo (1938–2017)
Bosnian master of line, memory, and quiet resistance.

Born in Mostar when it was still the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Hozo grew up amid Ottoman stone, Austro-Hungarian order, and the layered calligraphy of Balkan history. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, he became one of the great graphic artists of socialist Yugoslavia, renowned for etching, aquatint, and book illustration of almost surgical precision.

His signature world is monochrome, architectural, and metaphysical: minarets dissolving into light, bridges hovering between centuries, courtyards empty but vibrating with presence. Where others painted heroic workers or partisan epics, Hozo etched time itself — stone worn by prayer, silence shaped by geometry, memory as negative space.

In 1992, as Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence and slid into war, Hozo was entrusted with one of the most symbolic acts a new state can perform: giving form to its money. He designed the first Bosnian banknotes, austere, dignified, and deliberately non-triumphalist. No bombast, no nationalist bomb-throwing in visual form — instead, sober line, restrained ornament, and a humanist sense of continuity. In the middle of siege and fragmentation, his engraver’s hand asserted that Bosnia was not an improvisation but a civilization with depth, literacy, and aesthetic memory.

During the war itself, when Mostar’s Old Bridge was destroyed, his personal work took on a funereal, almost cosmic stillness. He did not depict explosions; he depicted absence. The void where continuity once stood. In this, he became a visual historian of loss without propaganda, a chronicler of civilization’s fragility rendered in copper plate and acid.

He also shaped generations as a professor in Sarajevo, codifying the theory of graphic art in the Balkans. His textbooks on printmaking remain foundational. Technically exacting, spiritually restrained, intellectually severe — yet suffused with a Sufi sense that line itself can pray.

If Mostar’s bridge is a stone sentence across a river,
Hozo’s banknotes were lines of sovereignty in ink,
and his etchings whispers across centuries:
that cultures can be shattered,
that form can survive,
and that black ink on white paper can still carry the full weight of a nation that refuses to vanish.