The collective memory, shaped by a long and intense process of social experiences, is the only way that societies sustain their past knowledge, their essence, which distinguishes them from others, in other words, their cultural accumulation across the centuries. Therefore, poems, legends, books, clothes and various cultural products are the main media that have the ability to transfer cultural characteristics and traditions to the future in order to legate the stored information from the past. At this point, one of the most important cultural productions is architectural spaces or even cities as physical environments. Cities and their constituent places are concrete representatives of the past and accumulated social knowledge. For this reason, literary works, events, lives and stories are constantly addressed through architectural spaces. In other words, architecture becomes the only tool that determines and directs the expression of the story.

This is also the case with literary works; independent from the genre, the plot always is accompanied by depictions of physical spaces. Thus, even if indirectly so, architecture becomes the only tool that determines and directs the expression of narratives in the reader. 

One of the best examples that can be given to this centuries-old tradition is the work of Ivo Andriç called Bridge on the Drina. While focusing on the Drina Bridge located in the city of Visegrad, Andriç tries to investigate and explicate the evolution of the social structure in the region and the great historical thresholds experienced on a global scale, through the bridge.

In this direction, the main goal is to examine and evaluate the relationship between literature and architecture in the context of monument and memory, through the example of the Drina Bridge. In short, the study aims to investigate the relationship between the architecture and literature and the role of the architecture in literarty works by investigating Andric’s The Bridge on the Drina. In other words, the study focuses primarily on the storytelling power of the architectural space, the place the architectural structures acquires in collective memory and their ability to transfer past knowledge to the future. 

The Drina Bridge not only places an architectural product in the center, but also constantly associates a story (that spans centuries) with the bridge and tells all the important events on the bridge. Therefore, in this study, an inquiry has been made on the monumentalization of the bridge, its place in social memory, its power to represent memory, the roles it assumes in the historical process and its value. With this questioning, an attempt is made to discuss the relationship between literature and architecture disciplines in the context of the role and power of architectural structures in literary expressions. In this direction, in order to examine in more detail what role the bridge plays in the story and how the story is shaped within the framework of the bridge, the study is divided into the subheadings: “memory, monumentality and the Drina Bridge”, “the spatial characteristics of the bridge and how the bridge shapes its environment?”, “the place of the bridge in social life”, symbolic value and politicization” and “Bridge of Drina as a storyteller”.

Based on the example of Drina Bridge, it can be argued that apart from defining a physical environment in the story as in other literary works, the architectural product is in fact the main elements that can sit in the center of the story, tell the story, identify with the characters in the story, and give direction to the story. With the depictions of the physical environment, architecture actually gives the reader clues about the period, experiences, social classes, and memory, and provides a better understanding of the story. This is also the case with the Drina Bridge. By constructing metaphors on a bridge, Andriç discusses the formation of a nation and its subsequent dissolution, the sense of nationality and the social consequences it brings, the brutality of war, and the phenomenon of living together in peacetime regardless of language, religion or race. Although the Drina bridge, which is the subject of the story, has undergone little physical transformation over the centuries, it has undergone great semantic transformations and takes on different meanings according to time and point of view.  

In this context, the Drina Bridge emerges as a very powerful example of an architectural product in terms of its story-telling power. The bridge, as an architectural product, is the element that conveys the story, directs it and prepares a background for it. In other words, The Bridge on the Drina contains important data at the point of examining and questioning the mutual interaction established between architecture and literature. As a result, the study reveals that The Bridge on the Drina has strong potential in terms of ‘the relationship between architecture and literature’.