If you’re traveling through Bosnia & Herzegovina, as I did in the summer of 2022 shortly after graduating college, you’ll likely pass through the city of Mostar. Situated on the Neretva river, Mostar is a beautiful mix of Yugoslav-era concrete and medieval Ottoman architecture. A 16th-century stone bridge called, fittingly, Stari Most (“The Old Bridge”), spans the Neretva and defines the city’s skyline. You can jump off the bridge into the river, if you pay about 30 Euros and don’t mind risking death. I recommend exploring beyond the city center, though. If you walk far enough through Mostar to the sleepy Zrinjevac Park, you’ll come up on another tourist destination: a life-size bronze statue of cinema and martial arts icon Bruce Lee.
The (Real?) Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee is a man who should need no introduction. He was born in San Francisco on November 27th of 1940 to a father from Hong Kong and a mother from Shanghai. Lee was the first Asian-American film star to really put Hong Kong action cinema on the map for a wider global audience. His life’s work was unflinchingly progressive: as an instructor in late 50’s Seattle, he taught one of the most racially diverse groups of martial arts students anywhere in the world at that time. He continued to push for racial integration and acceptance throughout his career, until his untimely death due to complications from epilepsy in 1973. He’s also known for popularizing the roundhouse kick, which should honestly be enough in itself.
Bruce Lee is a legend, and legends change, warp, and twist throughout time. For example: was his 1964 fight with Wong Jack Man really over racial integration in Bay Area martial arts? As it turns out, it's more likely that Lee was just talking shit at the time, and Wong Jack Man needed some publicity. But the legend is that Bruce Lee was willing to go to the mat for inclusivity, and that’s the legend that endures today.
Bruce Lee will henceforth (in this essay) be known as Bruce Lee Prime.
The Birth and Life of Bosnian Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee was born in Mostar on November 26th of 2005 — the day before what would have been Bruce Lee Prime’s 65th birthday. Bosnian Bruce Lee is the oldest statue of Bruce Lee anywhere on Earth.
Bruce Lee was also born in Hong Kong on November 27th of 2005 — the day of what would have been Bruce Lee Prime’s 65th birthday. The statue was unveiled in an event attended by Linda Emery, Bruce Lee’s widow. This makes Hong Kong Bruce Lee the second oldest statue of Bruce Lee anywhere on Earth, by a single day. Hong Kong Bruce Lee won’t come up again (this essay is about his older cousin from Bosnia, after all), but I loved this fact too much to exclude it.
Like Bruce Lee Prime, Bosnian Bruce Lee is a legend. He was born 10 years after a brutal civil war (largely along ethnic lines between Serbs, Croatians, and primarily Muslim Bosniaks) that threatened to tear the nation of Bosnia apart. I won’t get too much into the history here, but will have some recommendations for further reading and watching at the bottom of this essay. Suffice to say that Mostar was hit very hard in the fighting. The city was under siege from April – June 1992, and again from May 1993 – April 1994, resulting in the deaths of over 800 civilians. Stari Most, the 500-year-old bridge spanning the Neretva and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was destroyed by Croatian Defense Council forces in 1993. Right next to Bosnian Bruce Lee is an abandoned office building, now filled with (beautiful) graffiti. The building was used as a sniper's nest during the war, due to the views of downtown areas densely populated with civilians.
Views from the office building next-door to Bruce
I give this context not to glorify the violence that the city of Mostar experienced between the years of 1992 to 1995, but because that context is vital to understanding the place and time that Bruce Lee was born into. In 2005, Mostar needed to heal from both external damage and internal divisions. What better symbol of strength through diversity than Bruce Lee Prime, the legend?
On the day of Bosnian Bruce Lee’s birth, this was made explicit. Veselin Gatalo, a young local organizer with Mostar’s Urban Movement and driving force behind the statue, put it best: “This does not mean that Bruce Lee will unite us, because people are different and cannot be united and we will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats...but one thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.”
And, for years, Bosnian Bruce Lee lived his quiet life in Mostar, standing on a granite plinth that reads (in Bosnian) “Bruce Lee – Your Mostar”. He is forever immobilized in a defensive stance, nunchuks ready for any ne’er-do-wells.
When I met him in 2022, he had dulled from a brilliant bronze shine to a dark patina. One of the only parts of the statue that still shone was the palm of his hand, where friends had given Bruce a high-five. I, of course, did the same, and Bosnian Bruce Lee became my friend.
In the past three-and-a-half years, I’ve kept loose tabs on Bosnian Bruce Lee. Whenever I talk about that trip to Bosnia, Bruce comes up, and I treasure that photo. “Isn’t it weird and kinda cool,” I think, and sometimes say, “that a city in Bosnia with no connection to Bruce Lee has one of only three existing statues of him?” Bruce would come up in my thoughts every month or so, and I would smile at the seeming incongruity, and then continue on with my day. I didn't even know why Bruce was there in the first place. I didn't even know he was gone.
The Death of Bosnian Bruce Lee
It was during one of these reminiscences a few days ago that I found out about Bruce's fate. Bosnia just so happened to come up in a group chat, and I texted my photo of my best friend Bosnian Bruce Lee with the following caption:
fun bosnia fact in Mostar there’s a bronze statue of Bruce Lee for no reason other than people there really like bruce lee
I went to Bosnian Bruce’s Wikipedia page (of course he has one, he’s an icon) out of curiosity and was met with the following:
This is how I found out about Bruce’s murder – a note at the end of a Wikipedia article that linked to a Croatian news story. I learned that Bruce had been kidnapped, and cut into pieces to be melted down. I saw photos of the pieces being handled by Bosnian police after their recovery. I saw photos of the empty plinth, still reading “Bruce Lee – Your Mostar”, but this time with others taking Bruce’s place.
We are all Bosnian Bruce Lee (via Google Maps)
I started to think that, in a way, maybe we can all be Bosnian Bruce Lee. Maybe we can all embody the spirit of unity through adversity that he represented.
But, still, I have to acknowledge the loss. Bruce Lee died in Mostar on March 3rd of 2024.
The Second Coming of Bosnian Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee was (re-)born in Mostar on December 17th of 2025, more than a year after his death. The Mostar Tourist Board spent roughly 35,000 Bosnian marks (roughly $20,000US today) on his construction. Bruce is back on his plinth, in his trademark defensive stance, nunchuks at the ready, like he was never gone.
If I visited Zrinjevac Park today and gave Bruce Lee a high-five, it would feel the same (to me and, presumably, to the statue). It would, similarly to the first time I met him, probably be one of the high points of my day. But I wouldn’t be able to forget that Bruce was also kidnapped and cut up for scrap. I wouldn’t be able to forget the person who did 10 months in prison for the crime, and I would still wonder why, of all the bronze they could have scrapped, they had to scrap Bruce. I would still wonder why they felt the need to destroy. Despite Bruce being back, something had irrevocably changed.
And maybe this disconnect is a microcosm of what the citizens of Mostar feel today, crossing the Stari Most that was rebuilt after being shelled in the 90’s. Maybe that’s what they feel seeing familiar buildings that were rebuilt from the rubble, living in a country that was remade. People die, and we remember them, and they never come back. Places like the Stari Most and objects like Bosnian Bruce Lee, though, we can rebuild. They can come back, the same as before. So I have to accept a fact: if the reborn Bruce is the same, then I’m the only one who’s changed.
Readings
In this essay, I talked a lot about Bosnia’s Civil War. If you want to learn more, here’s a (very incomplete) list of resources:
Books:
- The War is Dead, Long Live the War, by Ed Vulliamy, 2013 (Internet Archive)
- Zlata’s Diary, by Zlata Filipović, 1995 (Internet Archive)
- Bosnia, A Short History, by Noel Malcom, 1996 (Internet Archive)
Films:
- Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, 1996, (Letterboxd)
- No Man’s Land, 2001 (Letterboxd)
- The Death of Yugoslavia, 1995 BBC Documentary (YouTube)
In general, I’d also heavily recommend exploring Bosnian and Yugoslavian history outside of the 90’s, because it’s a really interesting part of the world that has so many more stories to tell.
