‘It was a light in the dark’: how a bakery transformed lives in war-torn Mostar

Jasmin Elezović in front of the Old Bridge in Mostar, which was destroyed during the war in 1993. Photograph: Jasmin Brutus/The Guardian

Jasmin Elezović was six years old when his home became a war zone.

It was 1993 and the historic city of Mostar, straddling the Neretva River in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina, had become the centre of some of the most vicious fighting of the Bosnian war, which had begun more than a year earlier.