When his father, Ivan Antun Andric, died in 1894, Ivo's mother, Katarina, took him to her sister- in-law in Visegrad, a small town with a well-known bridge spanning the river Drina. He spent his formative years in Visegrad and attended elementary school there. In "Staze" (Paths, 1940) he describes the profound effect of the surroundings in which he grew up in a short passage of reflective prose, which came to be one of his favorite genres:
It was on these paths, which the wind sweeps and the rain washes, which the sun infects and disinfects, where you meet only exhausted livestock and silent people with hard faces, it was on these paths that I founded my dream about the riches and beauty of the world. It was here that, uneducated, weak and empty-handed, I was happy with an intoxicating happiness, happy because of all that was not here, which could not be and never would be. . . . And on all the roads and highways I passed along in later life, I lived only from that meagre happiness, from my Visegrad thoughts about the riches and beauty of the created world. For, beneath all the roads of the world, there always ran, visible and sensible only to me, the sharp Visegrad path, from the day I left it until today.
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