The post-war ethnically divided cities are often subjects of highly political attempts to glorify their pre-division and pre-war pasts, both in the scholarship and in the common thinking. In this paper I write that this “idealisation” of the past of an ethnically divided city is problematic as it does not include the understanding that the ethnically divided cities are – like all the other cities – to some extent
“normal” places where people work, shop and pray. They are not loci of “ideal” versions of ethnic cohabitation or ethnic divisions, but they are places where ethnic cohabitation is, like elsewhere, happening somewhere between the extreme ends of the scale. I base my study on a research conducted in the ethnically
divided city of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina.