7/24 Wednesday
We
have our Lonely Planet directions to get to the Tunnel Museum, an essential
site to visit. The No.3 tram stops right at our block, and travels through what’s
called the New City along the open river flatland between the mountains that
frame the city. We rattle our way down the tracks for 40 minutes or so, past
the airport to the end of the line. There’s a bus station nearby, where we need
to find the No.32 bus to the Tunnel street. There are several buses waiting,
but none of them are right. We ask people at the bus info office, and at some
of the bakeries and coffee shops, but nobody can understand us. Someone makes a
vague gesture to one of the stops, so that’s our best hope. A bus comes in with
no numbers on it, but it does have the name of the stop that we need, so we get
on, and ask the driver “Tunnel?” He says “Ya, ya, tunnel.”
The
bus goes through the residential neighborhood, with small farms all along the
way growing corn, melons, squash. The homes are built in a style that looks
similar to those in the Alsace or Swiss hills. We stop at a turn-around, with
nothing much around us. The driver points down a small street, showing us where
to walk. We walk about for a half mile, with one other couple following us, no
signs or any other evidence of a museum, no people, just an occasional bicycler
or passing car. The homes have neat, fenced yards with gardens and fruit trees.
The
museum is just another one of these farmhomes, with an entry portal to the
courtyard. Here, we see a narrow entry into the tunnel. The story is laid out
in a small museum in the house, and with news stories and photos along the
walls around the tunnel. A side room, with ammo crates for seats, shows an
unnarrated video documenting the building of the tunnel, and some scenes of the
siege. The family of the farm couple who gave their home over to the tunnel,
and also gave some care and comfort to the solders building it, run the museum
to keep their legacy alive. The story is all very dramatic, and brings some the
reality of the war to life.
The
tunnel extended for 800 meters beneath the runways of the airport, providing a
safe corridor, primarily for the soldiers, but also for some civilians, to
bring communications, weapons and food into the city during the four year
siege. The Yugoslavian and Serbian armies were installed in the mountains all
around the city, subjecting the people to daily shelling and indiscriminate
sniper fire. The UN nominally held the small region of the airport as neutral
ground, but no one was safe at any time or place. The hand-dug tunnel, about a
meter wide and 1 ½ meters high, usually half full of water, was the solution.
Now,
the museum maintains about 20 meters of the tunnel that visitors can actually
walk through. It’s an eerie, unsettling experience. The video is also
disturbing, showing some of the buildings in the city that we’ve just ridden
past being bombed, on fire, women clutching babies running through gunfire,
soldiers in the streets.
The
evidence of the war is all around us. We have bullet holes in the glass wall of
our terrace, and a clear view of a mortar blast in the apartment building
across the courtyard. Our host, Adnan, has the kind of survivalist mentality
that comes from growing up in a war, with a garden, water storage and heavy
doors to his home compound.
We
get some salad fixings and go back to the compound to eat in. Adnan comes up
with a block of toilet paper, asks how everything is going, and tells us that
for the next few days, we’ll have a full house.
1 Video Included
Tunnel of Hope
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