Tunnel of Hope

From April 1992 Sarajevo was surrounded by besieging forces and cut off from the rest of Bosnia & Herzegovina; the city’s airport, controlled by the United Nations, lay between the besieged neighbourhood of Dobrinja and the free territory of Butmir beyond. In 1993 the Bosnian army and civilians began digging a tunnel beneath the airport runway, working by hand with picks and shovels in shifts around the clock for nearly four months. The completed tunnel — about 800 metres long, roughly 1.5 metres high and a metre wide — opened in July 1993 and became the city’s lifeline for the rest of the siege. An estimated 20 million marks’ worth of goods and vast numbers of people passed through it. The tunnel emerged into the cellar of the Kolar family house in Butmir, and it is that house and a preserved section of the tunnel that now form the museum. After the war the site was turned into a memorial and museum run by the Kolar family and later the city.