Description: My friends and I set off in a car from the Sarajevo city center in search of the Sarajevo Tunnel Museum with only a vague sense that it was located near the airport. The museum is a bit tucked away and hard to find—or maybe it isn’t, because after aimlessly driving down a few gravel streets, we ended up right in front of it.
The museum is actually inside and beneath the Kolar family home, just behind the airport. The Kolar house sits above one of two entrances to the 800-meter tunnel that was Sarajevo’s lifeline during the siege, and today visitors enter the cramped space to understand what a crossing was like. The Kolars run the museum themselves; Bosnia does not yet have any official exhibit commemorating the 1992-1995 Bosnian War or the siege of Sarajevo.
After paying a few dollars to help support the exhibits, our first stop was a room that plays an introductory video about the siege; as it attempts to explain how 11,000 lives were lost in the city, it plays images of the burning and bombing of all the buildings we’d just driven past to get to the museum. Perhaps the most moving images, though, are those of people using the tunnel right next to where visitors sit to watch the video.
After the introduction, we toured the home’s first floor, where the rooms are full of leftover weapons, medical supplies, maps, documents, and newspaper articles from the war. A lot of the gruesome logistics became illuminated to me here—who was fighting where and when. I understood what happened in a way that I hadn't gleaned from books and films.
Then, the tunnel. Just next to a mortar shell embedded in the ground and just beneath a façade pockmarked with scars, we entered the tunnel to experience, for a minute, what thousands of Sarajevans faced in the 1990s. The space is dark, cramped, and overflowing with terrible memories.
If you visit one thing in Sarajevo, make it this small museum—I found it to be a profound experience that provided much-needed context to what I knew of Bosnia’s recent history. While I loved everything about Sarajevo, I don’t think I’d understand the city at all if I hadn’t made this stop.
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