The former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina doesn’t feature on the list of favourite destinations for British overseas property buyers. Mentions of the capital, Sarajevo, and Mostar, the second city, instead trigger memories of the devastating civil war in the 1990s, which killed 100,000 people and displaced 2m. Fifteen years on, however, a small and intrepid band of pioneering Britons is moving in, attracted by improving transport links, government attempts to boost tourism and property prices half those in neighbouring Croatia.
Among them is Philip Lilleyman, 61, a former colonel from Rotherham, who in 2004 bought a ruined 18th-century Ottoman customs officer’s house in Trebinje, a handsome Venetian-style town straddling the glassy Trebisnjica River, 15 miles inland from the Croatian city of Dubrovnik. Lilleyman was stationed in Bosnia with the British army in the 1990s, and decided to build his dream property there when he retired.
The country remains politically volatile, and since the end of the war has been divided between two entities: the largely Serb Republika Srpska and the mainly Muslim and Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A further reminder of its troubled past was provided by the arrest last week at Heathrow airport of the former president, Ejup Ganic, accused over ambushing a Yugoslav army column in Sarajevo. Yet Paul Bradbury, British director of Agent, an estate agency that sells and develops property in Bosnia, insists the country has potential for buyers with mettle. “There are bargains everywhere — city three-beds for £70,000 and rural three-beds at £50,000,” he says.
For more: Don’t balk at the Balkans - Times Online
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