Hercegovina Kalifornija: Landscape and legacies in the Neretva Valley
Mela Žuljević
The dream of Herzegovina as California has been around for as long as I remember. It first appeared in Yugoslavia as an industrial and entrepreneurial vision of a landscape that could provide us with everything, provided we were sufficiently entrepreneurial. But it was also an image of a place of rest, where little is needed to enjoy life, in which case industrialisation may be unnecessary. This ideal landscape still hovers, like a fragile glimpse of a cancelled future, one that could have been but is unlikely to happen. At this very moment, hydropower plants are planned and constructed in the upper stream of the Neretva river. One of the first places to be affected is Glavatičevo, a village that was my early image of Herzegovina, my own “landscape citizenship.” I remember a childhood filled with sun, whitewater with pebbles surrounded by all kinds of life: fish, lambs, chickens, horses. With villages shrinking after the war and the rise of new dams and polluters along the river, this diversity of life faces decimation. If the dam construction continues, the Neretva Valley will start dying as its tributaries get caught in accumulations and their riverbeds dry out. The fresh water in the karst landscapes will be driven into pipes for the profit of the few. Hercegovina Kalifornija may well become a water-rich desert.
Neretva near Glavatičevo, 2023
I first heard of Osman Pirija some years ago while researching the history of urban development in Mostar. Upon learning about his story, I was surprised that I had not heard of him before, mostly because his life follows a plotline of someone destined to become a household name or a local legend. I started inquiring with my parents, friends, and acquaintances. What I learned were partial memories of a man and a visionary on a mission to revolutionise agriculture in Herzegovina. The memories were mixed with the usual Herzegovinian scepticism: lucid in dreaming of Herzegovina as a futuristic agricultural utopia while relentless and tenacious in holding on to what others sometimes saw as delusions. I wanted to know more as to why his story disappeared from public conversations and what legacies it left in the landscape, hoping that it might lead me to other environmental histories of the region.
The story of Hercegovina Kalifornija starts with the Yugoslav modernisation. In the eyes of the state, Herzegovina, like other karst regions, was an underdeveloped space in need of industrialisation. Following WWII, centralised planning urged quick industrial development of the new republics to alleviate economic differences between them. Industrialisation was the main motor of urbanisation. In Herzegovina, it started in the 1950s with the metal and military industry in Mostar.
Not everyone, though, favoured heavy industry as a path toward development. Osman Pirija (Stolac, 1926 – Mostar, 2002) was a local engineer who thought that Herzegovina should remain an agricultural region in line with its tradition, climate, and geology. In 1956, Pirija oversaw the merging of several small cooperatives into HEPOK, an agricultural firm based in Mostar. In the following twenty years, HEPOK initiated a multitude of projects, experiments, and constructions in soil cultivation, farming, irrigation systems, and horticulture as well as technological and logistical development. Pirija’s vision and work with HEPOK became synonymous with the Hercegovina Kalifornija dream.
Herzegovina California is allegedly a name he used to signal the possible future of the Neretva Valley, a karst landscape bathed in a warm Mediterranean climate and rich water resources suitable for viticulture. It was a vision for sustainable development based on food production that he conjured up after returning home from his studies in Sarajevo and England. This was an idealised landscape of agriculture and grapevine where green oases would replace the barren rock synonymous with the region. The karst was a symbol of neglect that could now be reversed by reliance on knowledge, technology, and entrepreneurship.
Pirija’s inspiration was likely influenced by the utopian images from 1970s California. In those years, Napa Valley became a globally famous wine hub, and he might have found it to be a convenient metaphor to communicate his own vision to the public. I picture him poring over images of the Napa Valley and visionary ideas of Californian initiatives inspired by ecological concepts, such as the Ecotopia. In his scholarly work, he cited the Californian futurist Herman Kahn and adopted his techno-capitalist visions of managing natural resources. Pirija’s vision of Herzegovina was one of a productive landscape: landscape as a machine. He imagined endless expanses of fertile fields networked through accumulation and irrigation systems meant to control the waterways of the region. He also anticipated a dam above Glavatičevo. Contradictions embedded in Hercegovina Kalifornija continue to shape the landscape to this day.
During the 2000s, I routinely travelled between Sarajevo and Mostar, taking the road running along the Neretva. A regular road view for me and my fellow bus riders soon became a must-take scenic route marketed to tourists. It is difficult to imagine just how “scenic” the route would have been half a century earlier, before the Jablanica megaproject was built in 1955. An elderly relative once told me about feeling shocked driving down the road for the first time after the dam had profoundly transformed the valley. The river stopped running between Konjic and Jablanica as the canyon, fields, and villages were flooded. He was accompanied by a senior engineer who, unlike him, was in awe rather than shock. “What’s wrong with you? Come on, this is progress!” he said. 
The Jablanica Dam in 2024
As I try to learn more about the different phases and visions of Herzegovina, I find my way to the Museum of Herzegovina in Mostar. There, I trace the story of HEPOK's developmental visions as it was told in Sloboda, a local newspaper. Almost all of the articles on HEPOK were written by journalist Džemal Raljević between 1956 and 1975. His columns paint the image of the region where development depended on sun, water, and ores. In other words, agriculture, the production of electric energy, and the processing of bauxite. Raljević’s articles index the effects of development over the years. Qualifiers such as “autarchic” and “underdeveloped,” he observes, were becoming less pertinent to the Herzegovinian economy. This progress coincided with the integration of smaller agricultural estates into HEPOK and the founding of Aluminij, a company that processed aluminium into semi-finished goods. One of the columns quotes Emerik Blum, the director of the famous Sarajevan Energoinvest, who called the aluminium metal of the future and observed that “extracting natural resources and selling them for nothing” is the main sign of underdevelopment. From the 1950s to its peak in the 1970s, the aluminium industry was routinely reaffirmed as the strategic priority for Herzegovina; I cn see how this vision dominated the Sloboda reports, while stories about HEPOK’s achievements were less prominent and less dramatic.
Časopis Sloboda, from the collection of the Museum of Herzegovina Mostar (used with permission).
At the time of establishing HEPOK and Aluminij, the image of Herzegovina as an empty, infertile landscape was inextricable from the perception of water management issues: rivers were considered wild and in need of control that would prevent flooding and help irrigate the karst. Raljević’s articles summarise the plans of the Central Planning Committee to build upstream dams that would control water retention and allow its release when needed. At the same time, dams threatened to impoverish flooded areas that came in their wake. Raljević writes: “It is a paradoxical truth that areas rich in natural resources are impoverished through the activation of these resources… Therefore, Herzegovina, an underdeveloped region, by activating its natural resources—rivers— remains underdeveloped”.
Fragments of Sloboda headlines, from the collection of the Museum of Herzegovina Mostar (used with permission).
Under Pirija’s leadership, HEPOK was on a mission to change Herzegovina from a barren karst to a food-growing gateway for the international market. He branded local wine varieties like Blatina and Žilavka in an attempt to offer refined products. According to reports, HEPOK’s progress was impressive: in only fifteen years it grew to encompass ten hectares of greenhouses, a hundred hectares of orchards and vineyards, two cow farms, a slaughterhouse, a dairy farm and a factory of animal feed. HEPOK is also remembered as a site of futuristic experimentation. Galaksija, a Yugoslav popular science journal, featured the company’s experimental work in 1974 under the title “Yugoslav Karst Granary,” reporting on their solutions toward ecological balance through soil restoration:
… first covering the rocks with fodder and then grounding them with heavy machinery to keep the seeds in the stones which contain moisture within them. These were seeds of vetch and alfalfa, plants with strong roots, which kept penetrating and eroding the rocky ground— four years after this process, the tractors grounded the stones further, and after removing larger leftovers, the ground was ready to plant.
The vision of Herzegovina as a green oasis and a factory of food was far from universally accepted. The state planning was based on industrialisation principles and its local projects clashed with the visions of HEPOK. Already in 1964, the Yugoslav newspaper Borba reported on Pirija’s calls for legal and financial frameworks that would equalise the position of agricultural workers with those working in industry. However, insights into the details and background debates about conflicts around the aluminium industry are difficult to find in the archives. This is not entirely unexpected considering that such conflicts were often resolved away from the public eye.
A report in Belgrade-based Duga hinted at Pirija’s resistance by using a metaphor. They wrote about how Pirija installed a sculpture of a donkey at the entrance of the HEPOK-founded marketplace in Mostar. In his words, the donkey was meant to represent the hard, persistent work of the Herzegovinian peasants. But, who was the donkey intended for, wondered the article’s authors, alluding to another symbolic meaning of this animal, that of stubbornness. Perhaps, they insinuated, it was Mostar’s gift to Pirija, rather than the other way around, hinting at the conflict between HEPOK and Central Planning. As if foreshadowing what was to come in 1990, the journal Naši dani described Pirija as a figure of resistance and his vision as a future that could have been but was now lost:
Who are those who stirred the Bosnian economy towards the production of cubic metres and megawatts... and who destroyed every idea of developing those branches of the Bosnian economy for which the country was suitable? (...) The development of agriculture in Herzegovina experienced fantastic growth: Osman Pirija turned the already favourable climate into, without any pathos, Yugo-California. However, under sustained pressure from the "energy and metallurgical lobby," an aluminium plant that required two hydroelectric plants was built there. (...) After that, Osman Pirija went to Ethiopia under the auspices of the United Nations, spending his most mature and productive years working for others.
In recent years, HEPOK and the “alternative” visions for Herzegovina have been framed as Pirija’s personal projects. The stories about his work tend to erase the collective history of HEPOK and describe Pirija as a lone hero who turned barren rock into oases of human wellbeing. The image of Pirija as a symbol of resistance crystallised in the early 2000s. His visionary projects resurfaced in various critical takes focusing on new environmentally disastrous developments. He is remembered as being ahead of his time in anticipating the devastating effects of the metal industry. Media accounts remind us how Pirija’s vision clashed with the Communist Party’s plans to establish an aluminium factory. His opposition to its construction in the 1970s led to his removal from the leadership of HEPOK.
Still from the recording of TV Fokus aired on RTVMO on 22.01.2002 with Osman Pirija and the host, Alija Behram (RTVMO archive).
In January 2002, shortly before his death, Pirija gave an interview to the political magazine Focus after “twenty-nine years of being silent.” The interviewer Alija Behram framed it as a story of how the Communist Party brought down both HEPOK and Hercegovina Kalifornija in its relentless pursuit of aluminium ore. Pirija talked about Herzegovina as “the greatest vegetable factory in Europe,” which he envisioned as a reaction to CP’s five-year plan that would lead to pollution by heavy industry. He sought to uncouple agriculture from centralised planning which he, retrospectively, saw as its colonial confinement for it to enter the global arena.
Pirija described his vision as one of slow progress. In the vineyards, this meant taking two years for the selection of proper grafts and bringing in dozens of grafters from abroad to develop seedlings on a large scale. It meant establishing cow farms, from where manure could be used to nurture the soil. This was a circular ecological project inspired by futuristic ideas. One such idea concerned mountain Velež, where a rainwater system and funiculars would run side by side. The implementation of these ideas was hampered by the attitude that agriculture was secondary to industry.
For Pirija, the key to solving this conflict was water. It is here, though, where his vision becomes increasingly industrial. He envisioned the expansion of the irrigation system as a watery landscape controlled by and in the service of men. He proposed the development of infrastructure—water, transport, electrification, and new technologies with a strong focus on controlling the freshwater supply. He proposed a series of smaller accumulations in the upper Neretva valley, like multipurpose dams and hydromelioration constructions:
Environmental movements (...) create a sensational happening by drawing attention to a certain problem. An example is the hydropower plant around Konjic. And I ask, what do we have besides water today in Bosnia and Herzegovina? What, other than water, guarantees opportunities for development here?
Where Buna and Bunica meet near Blagaj is Crni Vir. I spent my summers there as a child, and they are etched in my memory within an abundance of water. We walked these waterways like roads, carrying things in small boats to reach vacation spots in short distances from home. Now, when taking photos of these places, I have to make sure to leave out of the frame the piles of garbage on the shores, a common sight in postwar times. This year saw the construction of a canal in Fatničko Polje, the first step among many in building a complex freshwater accumulation system known as Upper Horizons. This concrete construction lacerates the entirety of a three-kilometres-long field. The Upper Horizons dates back to the 1970s, but it was abandoned due to safety concerns and insufficient understanding of how the collection of water across the karst would affect the complex groundwater system. We will soon learn if the canal in Fatničko Polje will drain the water from Buna and Bunica and, consequently, from the Neretva to which they flow. I wonder what Pirija would think about the abundance of water today. Would he stand by his balanced development models if the future he imagined turned out to be our present?In his postwar interviews, Pirija routinely used “we” when reflecting on HEPOK. For him, it was about the collective endeavour rather than an individual project. However, the idea of HEPOK as a collective struggle is absent from the most recent narratives, which portray his engagement as heroism provoked by colonial oppression. His legacy is instrumentalized in various postwar circles, casting him as either a symbol of Bosniak suffering or resistance to socialism (particularly in Bosnian Croat circles). Needless to say, these postwar appropriations of Pirija’s legacies feature shallow engagements with coloniality and use his life’s work to proclaim Yugoslavia as a colonial overlord of ethnically delineated communities.
At the same time, his alternatives came from a modernist perspective which— in different ways in different moments in time—also pictured the local context as “underdeveloped”. With HEPOK, even though in conflict with central ideas of what development should look like, he saw karst as emptiness in need of nurturing and proposed industrial visions of agriculture. Later on, his idea of Herzegovina as an underdeveloped region extended to the people as well. Comparing his postwar interviews with his earlier work, one notices a shift in thinking: from emphasising the struggles for the equality of agricultural workers in rural communities to linking lack of progress to the specific local “mentality.” The one reason for the failure of Herzegovina after the war was, in his own words, the “mentality of our people,” which he described as “submissive and bribable, fatalistic with built-in inferiority— not lacking resources but entrepreneurs, industrialists, and managers”.
Nowadays, remnants of HEPOK dot Herzegovina’s landscape. In places, glass shards form paths that emerged after the privatisation of the company’s greenhouses; metal was sold to scraps and glass was left to merge with the land. To reach the paths, one passes by the houses of those who appropriated leftovers of Pirija’s irrigation system. Some use the pipes to water their crops, others to empty cesspits. These small agricultural plots still stand, increasingly constrained by villas and pools that mushroom in the tourism construction boom. It is hard to imagine the amount of groundwater extracted to fill all the pools and the amount of human waste entering the ground in return. Only those who still attempt to live not only off the land but with the land, resist the new economy and the resulting landscape. The war put a final stop to both HEPOK and Yugoslav development dreams. The war itself came to an end through the Dayton Peace Agreement that created ethnic territories and, consequently, ethnic landscapes. The dividing line between Republika Srpska and the Federation of BiH, two ethnically-based administrative units that form modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, cuts through mountains, forests, and the Neretva River. Already during Yugoslavia, Pirija spoke of politically motivated fragmentation of water as the main obstacle to progress. This has now mutated into new conflicts over who owns the Neretva and whether Republika Srpska can build new dams that will likely devastate the Federation’s part of the valley. Political divisions of the country produced such ethnic landscapes that now benefit only the alliances of ethnonationalist ruling classes and investors who, under the guise of “green transition," capture water for private profit.
In the course of the neoliberal transition, HEPOK was privatised in 2008. Its privatisation was not even the worst example among many similar projects that took place after the war. The vineyards and other facilities remained partially in the company’s ownership, but much of its land was atomized into small entrepreneurships that now operate as elite wine tourism. As viticulture is no longer a matter of collective interest and benefit, there are few structures in place that would show the effects of new development on its future. As the landscape transformed from a societal good to a commodity, Hercegovina Kalifornija was reduced to a private vineyard.
The landscape reflects political struggles masked as nature and infrastructure. As Exo Adams writes, it is an interface "where political is made natural'' and “eternally capable of doubling back on itself as a self-evident category of natural, ‘apolitical’ truth”. Competing interests and expectations continue to shape landscape care in the face of the climate crisis. The visions of agriculture, such as the futuristic irrigation system which would connect all of Herzegovina into a green oasis, seem to have less and less place in the atmosphere of urgency and hopelessness this crisis brings along.
Still, can the stories of vineyards, orchards, cow farms, the agroecological institute, and irrigation systems once again become interconnected in a vision of slow progress? The growing resistance of local communities in the face of new hydropower projects creates spaces for collaboration among activists, scientists, artists, and small businesses. These connections and coalitions span across entity borders that parcel rivers and forests, foregrounding waterkeepers who challenge territorial divides and resist multinational energy investments that turn landscapes into assets. The travelling of Hercegovina Kalifornija metaphor in between an ideologised landscape and practices of resisting it holds potential for ways of thinking and being that counter territorial and developmental forms of world-making. The vision of Herzegovina as California and its legacies can be traced not only as materials in the landscape but also as past futures that shape how landscape care is articulated in the current moment.
On the way to Glavatičevo, the Neretva shows visible chalky sediments, likely the products of the dam construction. I talk to one of the local environmental activists and ask him about his neighbours’ reactions to the new dam. Some were, according to him, stunned, asking “but this isn’t our Neretva, is it?” As the new dam is built two hours away from Glavatičevo in another entity, that of Republika Srpska, it feels far away, maybe even on another river, also called Neretva. With this dam now finalised and almost operational, the notion that “it is too late” looms over conversations with local activists. This shifted temporality of being too late will be resisted with new battles and strategies, but those in power will still claim this as progress, as catching up with Europe, which placed its rivers into pipes a long time ago.