Bosnia remains beautiful, and its winding aqua rivers have lost none of their lustre.
Modern-day Bosnia formed when the territory expanded southwards to absorb the province of Hum (now Herzegovina). As a province of the Ottoman Empire, much of the population converted to Islam but, as a frontier province, the country was the first line of defence against incursions and consequently suffered recurring invasions. Then, under expulsion of the Turks in 1876, Bosnia was assigned to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and an influx of non-Muslims from the north brought Bosnia close to its present-day ethnic mix. Vienna's decision to fully annex Bosnia in 1908 produced a destabilising chain of events that triggered the First Balkan war and World War I. Serbia eventually annexed Bosnia as part of the new ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, renamed ‘Yugoslavia’ in 1929. in 1995, NATO aided the Croat and Muslim armies in retaking much of Bosnia's Serb-occupied territory. Robust American diplomacy split Bosnia between Serbs and Muslim-Croats. Since the end of war, the Dayton Accord has been reasonably successful in returning Bosnia to normality.