A few kilometers from Sarajevo's center, next to the airport, there's an apparently normal house. A yard, a door, rooms. For four years, from 1992 to 1996, it was one of the most important houses in Europe. Because underneath it ran the only way in or out of a besieged city.
The Tunnel of Hope was the underground connection that allowed Sarajevo to survive the longest siege endured by a modern European capital.
The Siege of Sarajevo: context to understand the tunnel
When Bosnia declared independence in 1992, Bosnian Serbs and Serbia refused to accept it. Sarajevo was surrounded. In 1993, during the war, someone proposed something bold: build a tunnel under the airport runway.
The construction: 800 meters in silence
The tunnel is approximately 800 meters long, 1 meter wide, and 1.6 meters high. Excavated in 1993, it took months of day-and-night work. At first everything was carried by hand. Later, rails and carts were installed. Through that space passed people, food, medicine, weapons, fuel, and electrical cables.
The Kolar family: the house that became history
The Kolar family lived in this house, right next to the airport. When construction began, one of the tunnel entrances ended up literally inside their property. Their home became one of the most important points for the city's survival. After the war, they chose to preserve this history. The same house that helped hide the tunnel entrance is now the museum we can visit today.
Visiting the Tunnel of Hope today
The museum is in the Butmir neighborhood, near Sarajevo Airport — about 10-15 minutes by taxi from the center. Inside, you'll find photographs, tools, objects from the siege, and real footage from those years. Today only a small section of the tunnel can be walked. But even those few meters — narrow, dark, humid, cold, with a maximum height of 1.6 meters — are enough to understand.
The numbers of the Siege of Sarajevo
The siege lasted from 1992 to 1995. 11,500 people died during the war in Bosnia. 1,600 of them were children. The sign outside the tunnel says it all: "Don't let them kill us."
