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Sarajevo, Bosnia (part 2) — August 2006
Our next stop was the Sarajevo Tunnel Museum. During the war in the 90s, Sarajevo was completely surrounded by the Serbian army who were occupying the mountains all around the city and bombing the hell out of it for four straight years. The city was completely cut off from food and supplies from outside, until some folks organized a secret tunnel to be built going out of the city from under the Sarajevo airport. The tunnel then served as a lifeline for the city for the remaining years of the war. The Serbs eventually learned that a tunnel existed, but they never discovered its location. Nowadays, a small part of the tunnel is kept open, and a small museum was built around it.
It's pretty claustrophobic in there; imagine walking a mile underground without being able to stand up all the way!
There's the entrance to the tunnel, and you can just barely see the airport in the background. The exit of the tunnel was on the other side of that; the whole tunnel was about a mile long. Even more amazing, construction of the tunnel was actually begun from both ends simultaneously, and the two teams met up perfectly in the middle. That's some good engineering.
This poster gives you a good idea of how completely cut off from the surrounding area Sarajevo was, and how the tunnel was the city's only means of access to the rest of the world.
I'm in the tunnel! It's spooky!
The way out. People walked through this tunnel through mud and water, without being able to stand up all the way, carrying huge bags of food and supplies, and we even saw one guy in the film we watched carrying a goat in his arms the whole way.
After the tunnel museum, we went back to Sarajevo proper for some more sightseeing. This is just some crazy architecture near the river.
Sarajevo old town.
Here's the beautiful courtyard of the city's biggest mosque.
You must obey the mosque rules! Okay, looks like no loud talking, no smoking, no cellphones, no guns, no... chariot races? No bikes, no whores, I think that dude's sandwich is dripping on the ground, and I'm pretty sure those two kids are feeling each other up.
On our way to the worst internet cafe in Eastern Europe.
Lada took us to the church her family used to go to when she lived in Sarajevo.
Inside the church.
Spiderweb in the window of the church.
I don't know if this a little kid's coffin or if it has some sort of holy relic inside or what.
Upstairs in the church, there was a back door that led us out onto the roof, and then up some more stairs outside, past someone's laundry hanging on a line, and then this view!
Back outside the church, I noticed this giant wooden cross on top of a pile of rubble from some renovation that's going on. It struck me as kind of creepy, but really, they're just fixing the place up, no big deal.
Another mosque, and a nice view of the mountains.
Around this time, we started collecting people and cars to all go have dinner on a mountain...
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