Stadion pod Bijelim Brijegom

Stadion pod Bijelim Brijegom (English: Bijeli Brijeg Stadium), also known as HSK Zrinjski Stadium, is a City of Mostar owned association football stadium, located in the city of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The venue is currently home of HSK Zrinjski Mostar. Today it has a capacity of 9,000 seats, and before the stadiums's conversion to an all-seater venue, its capacity exceeded 25,000.

History

The stadium was built in 1958 with the public subsidies, and volunteering construction works by all denizens of Mostar, particularly students, and it served as the home ground of Velez Mostar during SFR Yugoslavia era. During the Bosnian War, between 1992 and 1995, and in particular subsequent incitement of Croat-Bosniak hostilities, the city of Mostar was effectively split to two parts, western (Croat) and eastern (Bosniak), divided around the river Neretva. The stadium sustained heavy damage during the war, while conflicting ideologies and interests were conveyed from the war times into the post-war era, evidenced in continuous and steady political divisiveness in the city of Mostar, among other, in issues of territorial and ownership disputes. Such political ambiance showed in the forced eviction of FK Velez Mostar from its traditional home-ground of stadium Pod Bijelim Brijegom, and subsequent political and public disputes over stadium usurpation by another club, emerging in the city at the beginning of the war in 1992, namely HSK Zrinjski Mostar, one of three city's ethno-national football organizations banned by the former Yugoslav government immediately after the World War II. From that moment onward stadium serves solely as the home ground of Zrinjski Mostar.

FK Velez Mostar used stadium Pod Bijelim Brijegom from the time it was built until 1992, through the club's glory days, when they emerged triumphant from their campaigns in the 1981 and 1986 Yugoslav Cups competition, and before that when the club also reached the quarter-final stage of the 1974–75 UEFA Cup. People around V