The name Mostar, first recorded in 1474., does not, as most guide books sugest, refer to the famous stone bridge but instead means "Bridge Keeper." Before Ottoman rimes, Mostar's tiny urban center grew up around Neretva river: a small hamlet hundled near a perilous wooden bridge along the principal road from Bosnia to the Adriatic coast. "It was made of wood and hung on chains," the Ottoman geographer Katib Celebi later wrote, "and, ...shook so much that people crossing it did so in mortal fear." As Mostar's economic and administrative importance grew under the Ottomans, the wooden suspension bridge required replacement. In the rule of the Fatih Mehmed a timber bridge was constructed, but Mostar owes its immortality to Stari Most, the bridge built in 1557.-66. at the height of the power of the Empire, during the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. Its construction was a critical step in the transformation of the city of Mostar from a modest settlement into a vibrant colonial crossroads. The bridge crossing at Mostar was one of the means by which Suleyman's army would reach the gates of Vienna.

Stari Most was designed and executed by Hayruddin, disciple of the famed architect Sinan, and supervised by Karadjoz Mehmed Beg, brother of Rustem Pasha, and the patron of Mostar's most important mosque complex. A single sweeping arch twenty-eight meters long, and twenty meters high, the bridge was an engineering wonder in its own time and remained the single largest stone span in the world until its destruction in this decade.