Ten days in the western Balkans: Ottoman Bosnia first, then Venetian water

Drop your bags and walk into the old bazaar, a grid of low buildings and narrow lanes laid out in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and still organised by trade, so the coppersmiths are all in one street and the goldsmiths in another. The hammering starts early and stops around six.

The wooden fountain in the middle of the main square is where everyone arranges to meet. The original was put up in 1753 and burned down; what stands now was rebuilt in 1891 by an Austrian architect who copied the Ottoman form rather than replacing it, which is a fair summary of how the two empires got on here.

A minute south is the mosque that gave the quarter its shape, built in 1530 by the Ottoman governor who also endowed the bazaar, the baths, the clock tower and a library. Non-Muslims are welcome outside prayer times; cover your shoulders and knees, take your shoes off, and give the courtyard fountain a moment.

Finish in the courtyard of the only Ottoman inn left standing in the city, built in 1551 to house merchants and their horses on the road from Istanbul. The stables are now carpet shops and the upper gallery is a cafe. Order a Bosnian coffee and stay an hour.

Start at the bridge over the Miljacka where, on 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie after the driver of their car took a wrong turn and stopped to reverse. Five weeks later Europe was at war. The bridge itself is an eighteenth century stone arch and looks like nothing much, which is part of the effect.

The museum on the corner is two rooms about the Austro-Hungarian decades, from the occupation in 1878 to the collapse in 1918, and it is worth half an hour for the photographs alone: a provincial Ottoman town being fitted out with trams, a brewery, a town hall and an opera-going bourgeoisie in forty years flat.

Walk east along the river to the building at the end, a pseudo-Moorish confection of stripes and arches finished in 1894 as the city hall and later the national library. Shells set it alight on the night of 25 August 1992 and something close to two million books and manuscripts burned. It was reopened in 2014 after a twenty year restoration, and the atrium under the stained glass is worth the ticket on its own.

The rest of the afternoon is for the streets in between, which are the best surviving Austro-Hungarian townscape outside Vienna and Budapest and are almost entirely unvisited.

Give the morning to the tunnel. From 1992 the city was surrounded, and the only ground that was not held by the besiegers was the airport, which the United Nations controlled and would not let anyone cross. So over four months in 1993 the defenders dug underneath it from a house on either side: about eight hundred metres, a metre and a half high, hand dug, with a rail for trolleys and a pipe carrying fuel. Everything that came into Sarajevo for the next three years came through it, bent double.

The house at the southern end is now a museum, with about twenty-five metres of the tunnel left open to walk. It is twenty minutes out of town by taxi or a tram and a walk, and it is the single most useful hour you will spend in Bosnia.

In the afternoon, the museum in the centre built entirely out of objects donated by people who were children during the siege, each with the owner's own account of why it mattered. A ballet shoe, a diary, a bicycle. It opened in 2017 and it is exceptionally well done, which is another way of saying it is hard to get through.

Then go up. The cable car from the eastern edge of the old town was built in 1959, destroyed in the war and rebuilt in 2018, and it lifts you nine minutes onto the ridge the city was shelled from. The whole valley is laid out below, the air is cooler, and there are cafes at the top.

The train south is the best two hours of transport in the country. The line was laid on an old narrow gauge alignment and never straightened, so it clings to the side of the Neretva canyon, crosses and recrosses the river and runs through tunnels cut by hand. Sit on the right leaving Sarajevo. The rolling stock is Spanish-built and unreasonably comfortable.

Mostar station is a fifteen minute walk from the old town, or five euros in a taxi. Drop your bags and go to the bridge, which is the whole reason anybody comes: a single stone arch of nearly thirty metres span, humped so steeply that the surface has stone ribs across it to stop you slipping, and about twenty-four metres above the water.

Somewhere on the parapet there will be a man in swimming trunks doing stretches. The divers have been jumping here since the sixteenth century and they will not go until the crowd has produced enough money, which takes a while and is part of the show. It is a genuinely dangerous jump into cold, fast water and the club trains for years before anyone is allowed to do it.

For the view of the bridge rather than from it, climb the minaret of the small mosque on the eastern bank. It is a tight spiral, there is no passing, and the balcony at the top gives you the arch, the river and the two towers in one frame.

Then wait. The day trippers leave around five and the town becomes a different place.

Start with the largest Ottoman mosque in Herzegovina, built in 1557, a few minutes upstream from the bridge and far quieter than the one everybody climbs. The interior painting was restored after shell damage and the courtyard has a view down over the roofs.

Then a private house that has been in the same family for three hundred years, kept as an Ottoman merchant's home with separate men's and women's quarters, painted ceilings, low divans around the walls and a walled garden. Part of it still operates as a small hotel, which is why it feels lived in rather than curated.

In the afternoon, walk west, away from the river and the postcards. The boulevard five minutes from the bridge was the front line between Croat and Bosniak forces in 1993 and 1994, and the buildings along it are still shells: trees growing out of the upper floors, façades stitched with bullet holes, a bank tower left as a ruin. The town is quietly divided along it to this day, with separate schools and separate bus stations.

This is not a comfortable hour and it is the reason to stay a second night. The bridge is the story people come for, and the boulevard is the story that explains it.

The coach takes about three hours, out of the Neretva valley into stone country where the fields are the size of tablecloths and walled in limestone, then over the last ridge with the sea suddenly underneath. There is a passport check on the way.

Get off at Gruz and take a bus round to the old town. Come in through the western gate, down the steps, and walk the length of the polished limestone street to the far end, where the three buildings that ran the republic stand around a small square.

The palace on the corner is where the government sat. Rectors were elected for a single month and were not allowed out of the building while they served, which tells you how badly this place feared any one man getting comfortable. It is now the city museum, with the state coach, the courtroom and a courtyard used for concerts.

Next to it is the church of the patron saint, rebuilt in the 1710s after a fire, whose statue holds a silver model of the city as it looked before the 1667 earthquake. And across from both, the one grand house that came through that earthquake intact: Gothic below, Renaissance above, and a customs house, mint, bank and school in turn. It holds the state archive now, with a memorial room for the city's dead of the 1990s.

The walls open at eight and the whole day depends on being there. The circuit is about two kilometres, up to twenty-five metres high and several metres thick on the landward side, and it takes ninety minutes at a walking pace. There is no shade and no way to turn back once you are on it, so by late morning it is a single file queue in full sun. At eight it is empty.

Come down at the eastern end and go straight into the Dominican monastery inside the gate. It is a fourteenth and fifteenth century complex with a cloister of carved arches and a gallery of Dubrovnik school painting, including a Titian that most visitors walk past. It is almost always quiet, because it is at the wrong end of the street.

Then the small synagogue on the lane climbing north from the main street, on the second floor of an ordinary house. A Jewish community settled here in the fifteenth century, largely Sephardic families expelled from Spain, and this is one of the oldest synagogues in Europe still in use. The museum above it holds the community's Torah scrolls and papers from the persecution of 1941.

Finish at the Jesuit church at the top of the baroque staircase in the southern corner of the old town, built between 1667 and 1725 and modelled on the Gesù in Rome. The staircase in front of it was added in 1738 in imitation of the Spanish Steps, and it is the best place in Dubrovnik to sit at the end of the day.

The coach south takes about two and a half hours, most of it spent on a road that follows every inlet of the bay rather than crossing it. There is a passport check at the border, since Montenegro is outside the European Union, and the queue can be long in August. Some drivers take the short ferry across the narrows, which saves time and is the better ride.

Kotor's old town is a triangle of a few hectares against the base of a cliff, entered through a sea gate with a Venetian lion over it and a date from 1555. Inside, the lanes are so narrow and so irregular that a map is nearly useless and the squares are named after what used to happen in them: flour, milk, arms, salad.

The cathedral is the oldest thing standing, consecrated in 1166 to the fourth century martyr whose relics were bought here by a local merchant from a passing ship. Two towers, unequal because the money ran out and an earthquake took the rest, and a fourteenth century silver altar screen behind the high altar that took a Kotor workshop most of a century.

The other church worth an evening is the Orthodox one at the far end, the largest in the walled town, dark inside and hung with icons. Kotor has been Catholic and Orthodox side by side for centuries and the two congregations still process past each other on their respective feast days.

Start the climb before seven. About thirteen hundred and fifty steps switchback up the cliff behind the town, inside the fortifications, to a fort two hundred and sixty metres above the sea. It takes most people an hour up, there is no shade at all, and by ten in the morning in July it is genuinely dangerous. Take water, and take more than you think.

Halfway up is a small church built in the sixteenth century by survivors of a plague, and it is the natural place to stop and turn round: the town below is a perfect triangle of terracotta and the bay opens out behind it. Above that the path deteriorates and the fort at the top is a ruin, which is fine, because the view is what you came for.

In the afternoon, get on the water. Boats run up the bay from Kotor and from the quay at Perast, and the target is the small round church on an artificial island offshore. Sailors dropped a rock there after every safe voyage for four hundred years, and sank old ships alongside, until there was enough ground to build on. The church inside is lined with silver votive plaques and an embroidery a local woman worked for twenty-five years using her own hair as it greyed.

The other island is fifty metres away, natural, with a Benedictine monastery and cypress trees, and you cannot land on it. Every boat circles it anyway.

One thing before the airport. The maritime museum occupies an eighteenth century palace on a small square and covers the extraordinary fact that this bay, with a total population of a few tens of thousands, ran a merchant fleet of some three hundred ships and had a sailors' guild whose traditions go back the best part of a thousand years.

Three floors of model ships, charts, uniforms, weapons and portraits of captains, plus the furnished rooms of the family who built the palace. An hour, and it puts the whole bay in order: the churches on the islands, the palaces at Perast, the money that paid for the altar screen in the cathedral.

Tivat airport is eight kilometres away and takes twenty minutes by taxi, which is the only sensible way to reach it. Podgorica is ninety minutes inland and Dubrovnik is two hours back up the coast, both with more flights, and both need a border crossing counted into the timing.

If the flight is late, swim. There are ladders into the water all along the road north of the town and the bay is warm from June to October.