The gateway to Tara Canyon — Bosnia's whitewater capital on the Drina River with an Ottoman mosque that predates Shakespeare
Foča sits at the confluence of the Tara and Drina rivers in eastern Bosnia, where the two great canyon rivers of the western Balkans meet. The town itself is small and administratively complex (it is part of Republika Srpska, renamed Srbinje for a period in the 1990s, now reverted to Foča), but the surrounding landscape is the main event: the Tara River Canyon immediately upstream is one of Europe's deepest gorges at up to 1,300m, and it's been a whitewater rafting destination since the 1970s. The Aladža Mosque (1550) — blown up in 1992 and reconstructed — is one of the most complex Ottoman r…
Foča's strategic position at the Tara-Drina confluence made it an important settlement from antiquity. The Ottoman period transformed it into a significant regional market town — the Aladža Mosque (1550) was one of the finest in the Balkans, with elaborate painted interior frescoes unusual in Islamic architecture. The town experienced the full violence of Yugoslavia's dissolution: during 1992–1994, it was the site of documented war crimes against the Bosniak population, including systematic use of rape as a weapon of war; perpetrators were convicted at the International Criminal Tribunal for…