GROTTE DE DUMAN

Located in the steep cliffs of Crvenica, at the foot of the karst hill of Bašajkovac and above the old town, this cave (Pećina Duman) houses the resurgence of the river Bistrica. In summer, you can swim or dive nearby in a pool with translucent waters. But in winter, the Bistrica spurts out of the cliffs with a large waterfall creating a thick cloud of droplets that earned the site the Turkish name duman, meaning "smoke" in French. It is around this resurgence that the human habitat has been concentrated for 5,000 years, especially during the Ottoman period, water being the central element in the Islamic culture. Directly under the fortress of Bistrica, this area is developed with a mill, old tanners' facilities and an Ottoman bridge. The latter is called Duman's bridge (Most na Dumanu) or Firduzova bridge (Ćuprija Firduzova). It is believed to have been built by the local tanners in the late 17th or early 18th century. Equipped with a single arch of 4.4 m high, it extends 27.60 m in length and 3 m in width. The Bistrica River rises a few kilometers upstream and then disappears into the karst rock. It comes out here to cross Livno before taking the name of Prokop ("canal"). Its bed was indeed diverted during the socialist period, forcing the river to end its course 14 km to the southwest, in Lipa, at the artificial lake of Lipsko which serves as a retention basin for the lake of Buško.