Treasures of the World Series
Le Havre

The rebuilding of the French city Le Havre.

On the Seine estuary in Normandy, where the broad river flows into the English Channel, lies the French city of Le Havre.

On 6 September 1944 Le Havre had almost ceased to exist.
Two days of air raids by British bombers had devastated the town which was still occupied by German forces.
More than 5000 people died in the attacks which reduced more than half the city’s buildings to rubble and destroyed its entire infrastructure.
Le Havre’s municipal administration was obliterated, along with virtually all its schools, shops, and churches.
The destruction caused by the bombing was too widespread to even think of reconstructing the town on a historical basis.
So the French government boldly approved a master plan for rebuilding Le Havre as a modern, urban unit. It was a spectacular, radical decision without parallel in architectural history.
Auguste Perret was entrusted with the task.

Treasures of the World Series
The Mostar Bridge

The Bridge over the River Neretva in Mostar was destroyed by Croatian gunners during the civil war in Bosnia in 1993.  It has since been rebuilt and was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005.

The bridge over the Neretva River in Mostar was built when the Turks conquered Bosnia and made it part of the Ottoman Empire.  Mimar Hayruddin, the Ottoman Empire’s greatest architect, completed the bridge in 1566. 
1088 stone blocks were put in place and joined together with iron staples. 
The town became an important trading centre in the Balkans. 
Mostar is the unofficial capital of Herzegovina and has a population of 100,000. 
For over 400 years Christians and Muslims lived there in peace. 
During the civil war in the 1990s the famous bridge of Mostar was destroyed on 9 November 1993. 
Reconstruction was undertaken by UNESCO with aid from Turkey, the Netherlands, Italy, the World Bank and Croatia and cost 15 million euros. 
The reconstruction was finished in 2004. 
Today Muslims live on the eastern bank of the Neretva, the Catholic Croatians on the western bank.  A 30-metre cross stands on a mountain above the city. 
It was from there that Croatian gunners fired down on the bridge which the watchtowers were unable to protect.