The his­toric town of Mostar, span­ning a deep val­ley of the Neret­va Riv­er, devel­oped in the 15th and 16th cen­turies as an Ottoman fron­tier town and dur­ing the Aus­tro-Hun­­gar­i­an peri­od in the 19th and 20th cen­turies. Mostar has long been known for its old Turk­ish hous­es and Old Bridge, Stari Most, after which it is named. In the 1990s con­flict, how­ev­er, most of the his­toric town and the Old Bridge, designed by the renowned archi­tect Sinan, was destroyed. The Old Bridge was recent­ly rebuilt and many of the edi­fices in the Old Town have been restored or rebuilt with the con­tri­bu­tion of an inter­na­tion­al sci­en­tif­ic com­mit­tee estab­lished by UNESCO. The Old Bridge area, with its pre-Ottoman, east­ern Ottoman, Mediter­ranean and west­ern Euro­pean archi­tec­tur­al fea­tures, is an out­stand­ing exam­ple of a mul­ti­cul­tur­al urban set­tle­ment. The recon­struct­ed Old Bridge and Old City of Mostar is a sym­bol of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, inter­na­tion­al co-oper­a­­tion and of the coex­is­tence of diverse cul­tur­al, eth­nic and reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties.