Of Dams and Heritage: the Drina Riverscape
In his Master thesis at IHE Delft, Robert Willard used visual research methods to explore competing narratives, contested memories, and shared emotions about dams, bridges, and a river in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Water and humans exist in a dynamic, changing system of elements like hydraulic infrastructure, seasonal floods, energy demands, and conflict. Their shifting relations imprint themselves upon an emerging riverscape, whose shape, physical and imagined, interacts with narratives constructed along its banks. The term, employed by Tricia Cusack in her eponymous book, speaks to both the actual geography of a river and the cultural representations that are attached to it.
These cultural representations are intertwined with political projects for using and exploiting water. Amidst the flux of riparian geography and human-nature relations, power is often expressed as control over the river’s flow. Hydrologically speaking, water, in the form of cubometers, is stocked, diverted and released by those with power. Ideologically speaking, the river is framed through narratives of belonging. Dams and heritage are two tools for expressing such control.
I define heritage as the relationship a community has to an object passed from generation to generation, with an imagination of its role for the community’s past and future. Although heritage can be shared with others, it is often used to express exclusive ownership (see Muzaini and Minca, 2018 and Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996).
Hydro-heritage pertains to our relationship to water and the objects it interacts with. Water is an essential part of life and a source of cleanliness. It is also amorphous, hard to control and sometimes dangerous. These attributes characterise the ways people relate to hydro-heritage (see Muehlebach, 2017).
In my MSc thesis research at IHE Delft, I looked at the representation of a dam in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a mountainous country where riverscapes are rich in heritage. This heritage, both natural and cultural, expresses stories of human ingenuity and resilience under conflict. I explored the case of the Drina River and two neighbouring cities on its banks, one Bosnian and the other Serb, separated by a contested dam.
Bosnia is split between a federal government representing ethnic Bosnians and Croats and an autonomous ethnically Serb government known as Republika Srpska. This is the result of the country’s 1992-1995 war for independence, in which the Drina was on the frontline of a bloody ethnic conflict, including acts of genocide.
In the post-war settlement, the two municipalities of Goražde and Višegrad, one majority Bosnian and the other Serb, were meant to co-exist along a shared riverscape. However, discourses of heritage have bolstered exclusivist claims to the basin and sidelined joint operation of the dam, which is located on the side of Višegrad. I sought to understand how these heritage discourses around the dam are constructed and how they are revived by local communities.
Dams and Heritage, Dams as Heritage
Much academic literature discusses how dams disrupt natural and cultural riverine heritage, altering the shape and flow of a river, inundating the upstream basin and disrupting livelihoods. In turn, the dam alters people’s imaginations of the riverscape. For instance, Amitangshu Acharya discusses how hydropower transformed the Umiam river in north-east India into a beloved recreational reservoir. When the local riparian ecosystem was threatened by siltation and pollution, campaigns to protect the Umiam rallied around its recent heritage as an artificial lake, rather than its natural state as a free-flowing river.
Dams may also be viewed as objects of heritage themselves, via their function and symbolism. The gravity dam’s form harks back to the monumentalism of antiquity— simple and elegant design, ingenious engineering, magnitude, and a vital role for human civilization. For governments, the portrayal of large hydropower projects as a nascent work of national heritage is convenient for controlling the basin.
Discourses of dams as heritage often employ parallelism to neighbouring sites of heritage in the riverscape. For example, Egyptian president Nasser celebrated the Aswan Dam musing: “In antiquity, we built pyramids for the dead. Now we will build new pyramids for the living” (Fahim, 1981, p. 14). Dams are even portrayed as a positive contribution to the heritage of the riverscape into which they are inserted. The Aswan project was celebrated as an opportunity to study Nubian artifacts upstream, with UNESCO support, which would eventually be inundated by the dam.

Višegrad, Goražde and the “On the Drina” Hydropower Plant
The Drina River is treasured as one of the most beautiful and wild rivers of the Balkans, with towering canyons, endangered fauna, and a complex history. Over 1454-1878, Višegrad was a strategic commercial hub in the Ottoman Empire, as well as the site of Nobel-prize-winning author Ivo Andrić’s novel Bridge on the Drina. Andrić narrates changing boundaries, identities and flows that upend livelihoods amidst the constant backdrop of a 15th century bridge. The elegantly designed bridge connects the river’s Bosniak and Serb communities. Today a UNESCO-protected World Heritage Site, it was a focal point of multiple conflicts throughout the 20th century. Since the war, the city has been majority Serb.

Forty kilometres upstream of Višegrad is the Bosnian Podrinje Kanton with its capital, Goražde. Goražde’s portion of the Drina is also rich in heritage. It is considered the cradle of both Orthodox and Islamic faith in Bosnia. The main bridge of the city’s downtown famously served as a cover from sniper fire during the siege of 1992-1995, a work of infrastructural heritage in its own right.

(Credits: Robert Willard)
Launched in 1989, the Višegrad dam (officially named the Hydropower Plant « On the Drina », after Andrić’s book) is on the Serb side of the administrative border. It, along with two other hydroelectric power plants on the Drina, has significantly altered the river’s character. The once-turbulent Drina is now a series of lakes.
This change has brought both positive and negative consequences for the region. On the one hand, the river’s levels are steadier, and its reservoir, Peručac, is a popular location for tourism. On the other hand, higher humidity has led to complaints of respiratory illness and the migration patterns of endangered migratory fish, like the huchen salmon, is threatened. Previous lapses in coordination of the Drina’s cascading dams resulted in a devastating flood in 2010 and 2021. The brunt of the destruction was faced by Goražde— sandwiched between the “On the Drina” hydropower plant and a Montenegrin barrage upstream, it has no say in how the dams are coordinated. The most visible issue with the dam is the annual accumulation of a large “trash island” at its crest. Problems with water quality, a result of the obstructed river flow, is exacerbated by lax regulation of illegal landfills and low cooperation among littoral municipalities.
Hydroelectric power has long been a hot button topic in the Balkans. Its proponents in the government argue that it provides energy security and a source of income in mountainous communities facing economic stagnation. Indeed, large hydropower plants have an outsized role in Bosnian cities like Goražde, Jabalnica or Jajce. They are the main employers and are often the namesake for cultural projects, charities and football teams. In Višegrad, an entire historic district was built with the hydropower plant’s funding. It is aptly called Andrićgrad. The hydropower plant’s headquarters is in the center of the district, with a statue of Nikola Tesla (considered the Serb who first invented hydropower) across the street. The hydropower plant “On the Drina” additionally produces a series of documentary films for each of its anniversaries, which employ strong visual imagery to portray the dam as integral to the riverscape.
Visual research on people’s narratives of the dam
In my thesis, I analyse the discourse of these videos, which juxtapose the dam alongside sites of heritage in the riverscape. Bird’s eye footage of the hydropower plant, set deep within the Drina canyons, amidst naturalistic pan-flute music implies the dam is an integral, if not natural, member of the river basin. The video blends figures like Andrić and Tesla, the wartime struggles of the 1990s and iconic sites like the Sokolović Bridge (see image below) to string a narrative of hydropower as part of the heritage of the Drina. It celebrates how the dam provided resilience in the war, while today it makes the river navigable and attractive for tourists.
Many residents along the Drina, however, consider hydropower to be a cover for corruption and profiteering by the elite. Civil society, which has an active place in Bosnian society, has its own arsenal of graphic images of overtopping, flooding, and trash accumulation at the dam’s crown, to compete with the hydropower plant administration’s media narrative. Concerned about the effects on environmental flows, water table levels, pollution and public health, local activists argue dams are part of the problem.Representing different stakeholders, the HPP and the activists compete for the image of the riverscape. I employed video-elicitation, a research technique which uses visual prompts as the starting point for semi-structured interviews, to put them in dialogue. In my study, I showed excerpts from the dam’s documentary to residents in both cities, alongside photographs of the Drina and sites of heritage. Through this audiovisual medium, I sought to elicit a discussion on heritage without directly referencing it. Heritage is a polemic term in Bosnia that can provoke nationalistic biases when brought up in discussion.
The notion of the dam as heritage fell on flat ears. Some in Višegrad did describe it as a temporary fixture that has done good for their community. But few people in either city considered the dam a permanent element of the riverscape, worthy to pass on to future generations. Whereas I certainly need more research to better understand the dam and/as heritage, my conversation with Amela Džafovic-Kešan, head of the Goražde civil society organisation “Eko-Habitat” is an important reflection of its current place in imaginaries of the riverscape.

Amela’s organization campaigns against expanded hydropower and pollution of the basin. She views activism as a front for environmental justice, that is, equal and sustainable relationships to the Drina, which account for its complicated history and politics.
In light of what we watched in the documentary, Amela flat out rejected “heritage” as a corrupted term. She described it as a cheap play on nationalism, used for the profit of the elites in Republika Srpska. The Drina elicited a larger meaning for Amela than just heritage. “Drina is not that. Drina is different,” she retorted. Looking out from the terrace onto the river, her face lit up.
“Drina is everything. Drina is life.”
Goražde’s shallow riverbank is reminiscent of the old, pre-dam river described in Andrić’s book. While Višegrad is set upon a deep reservoir, the river here remains free flowing, up till the edge of the city. The bright August sunlight, penetrating through the shallow emerald-blue waters, reflects off the shallowly submerged riverbed. Swimmers gather on the sunbaked rocks. Most wade along the banks, while the braver ones jump into the current, to be quickly carried downstream. Fishers set up on the boulders, shaded by the wartime bridge, a thoroughfare of pedestrian traffic in the evening. Truly, the Drina is “everything”. The word “heritage” angers Amela as a pejorative term for her river:
“It is not heritage. It is borrowed from my children. My grandfather lost his life there. Many others lost their grandfathers and fathers in the river.”
The Drina is a graveyard. But it is also the defining feature of the city to which Amela has devoted herself as an activist. It is the core identity of the only remaining Bosniak Muslim presence left along its banks after the war. And it is a place of joy, where the entire city empties out on a hot, summer day.
This rich, personal affect for Bosnia’s rivers —a source of life in peace and war, for both Serbs and Bosnians— motivates a deeper inquiry on how heritage, those elements with which we imagine our riverscape’s past, present and future, either competes with or embraces the infrastructure we build upon it.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Robert Willard (October 27, 2025). Of Dams and Heritage: the Drina Riverscape. FLOWs. Retrieved June 13, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/151lt




“Decades after the devastating 1990s wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Balkans lag behind the rest of Europe both economically and with regard to environmental protection.
” The countries of the region have made little progress in building effective, environmentally sound trash disposal systems despite seeking membership in the European Union and adopting some of the EU’s laws and regulations.”
— https://www.cbsnews.com/news/balkan-river-floating-garbage-dump/
Indeed, the accumulation of trash at the dam’s crest is first and foremost a product of poor waste management along the basin. The campaign highlighting the “trash island” views the HPP as responsible for cleaning it up.
This is because the trash is built up right at the dam, and the dam is one of the most profitable companies in the region. Naturally, argue the activists, the dam should finance mitigation measures. The dam’s leadership also overlaps with the municipal administration, whose lax enforcement measures are to blame .
The dam could, and sometimes does, position itself as a net benefit for waste management. If it wasn’t for the dam, the visuals of a massive trash island wouldn’t be there to help highlight the problem. The dam also provides a convenient barrage for collecting pollution. From my brief informal conversations with its administrators, the HPP argues it does take measures, and that the trash island is unnecessary negative press. Activists argue this only took place after they mounted media pressure in 2021.
“Decades after the devastating 1990s wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Balkans lag behind the rest of Europe both economically and with regard to environmental protection.
” The countries of the region have made little progress in building effective, environmentally sound trash disposal systems despite seeking membership in the European Union and adopting some of the EU’s laws and regulations.”
— https://www.cbsnews.com/news/balkan-river-floating-garbage-dump/
“This is an ecological disaster.…“The Drina is rich with fish and you can imagine the toxins that are being released here, there is virtually everything, it is a big catastrophe.
“The waste comes from illegal dump sites upstream in Bosnia but also in neighboring Serbia and Montenegro. Several smaller tributaries across the region float into the Drina, all carrying their portion of the garbage.
“Officials from the three countries have pledged to work together to solve the issue. One such meeting of the environment ministers of Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro was held at the site back in 2019 but no solution appears to be in sight years later.”
— https://apnews.com/article/bosnia-drina-river-garbage-activists-5b4505564d580ac3fd0312bd9515d201
The hydropower plant tends to “filter out” an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 cubic meters of floating waste but it’s not the plant that causes the pollution: The core problem that ultimately produces the “floating landfill” is the generally dysfunctional systemic waste management across the upstream regions of the Drina River basin.
The poorly regulated or illegal landfills along the Drina’s tributaries in Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina accumulate large amounts of waste, setting the stage for the region’s heavy rains to wash that garbage into the rivers.
Disgracefully, in this day and age, the Balkan nations generally lack effective, environmentally sound waste disposal and recycling infrastructure. Many communities do not have organized waste collection systems.
Of course, the problem — and so it’s solution — is transnational in nature, involving three countries (Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro) that have struggled to implement a coordinated, long-term solution, despite trilateral meetings.
Author Willard justly points out that “Heritage is a polemic term in Bosnia that can provoke nationalistic biases when brought up in discussion.” One deeply suspects that those same “nationalistic biases,” deep tensions and outright ethno-historic enmities blind officials on all sides of the table to the genuinely common menace that threatens all three nations and all their peoples.
Shame on all of them if they can’t let go of their historic animus long enough to agree on the true sources of the pollution that defiles the life-giving river so crucial to their citizens; and to launch a common Balkan Environmental Waste Disposal and Recycling System (“BEWDARS”) — and to follow through jointly and cooperatively to its completion, and then jointly and cooperatively celebrate its inauguration.
We can hope that Willard’s research and productions will steer all three nations towards such a cooperative solution.