Bihać

I hadn’t planned much for Bihać beyond a night to break up the drive toward Una National Park, but the town talked me into staying longer. The Una River doesn’t skirt around Bihać, it runs straight through it, split into channels by little tree-covered islands, moving fast and impossibly turquoise even in the gray light of a cloudy afternoon. Lia and I checked into a small guesthouse close enough to the water that we could hear the rapids from the room, and that first evening we just sat on a bench by the river with burek from a bakery down the street, watching kids jump off a low bridge into the current like it was the most normal thing in the world.

The next morning we walked up to the Fethija Mosque, which sits right at the town’s core and has one of those layered histories that stops me every time I think about it: built in the 15th century as the Church of St. Anthony, then converted into a mosque under Ottoman rule, the two identities somehow both still legible in the same building. I stood outside longer than I meant to, trying to picture the town through each version of itself. Bihać wears its history close to the surface like that. Walking around, especially with older locals, you feel the weight of the siege the town endured in the 1990s, part of what people still call the Bihać pocket — not something anyone brought up unprompted, but present in the way certain buildings are patched rather than rebuilt.

What pulled us here in the first place was Una National Park, and it did not disappoint. We drove south along the river to Štrbački Buk, where the Una drops over a wide cascade through a series of limestone shelves, the water throwing up a fine mist that caught the afternoon light. We hiked down to the viewing platforms and I remember just standing there, not taking photos for a few minutes, because it felt like it deserved actual attention rather than a screen.

On our last afternoon we finally got into the water ourselves, renting kayaks from a small outfit near the old town and paddling a slow stretch of the Una before the current picked up again. Lia kept saying she’d never seen a river that color outside of a photo filter, and honestly I hadn’t either. Bihać ended up being one of those places I almost skipped and now can’t stop recommending.

When to go: Aim for May through September, when the Una warms up enough to actually get in it, whether that’s rafting the rapids or kayaking the calmer stretches near town.