Tito's Bunker
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A very large former nuclear bunker complex inside a mountain in central Bosnia and Herzegovina. The top-secret compound was intended to protect not just Tito and his family but also some 350 people of the elite inner circle of the military and government. Only from 2011 has the place become accessible to ordinary mortals, albeit solely on guided tours that have to be prearranged in advance, as official permits are required. The tours provide a cool glimpse into the Cold-War paranoia of the time and also feature plenty of retro technology as well as some modern art.
More background info: The design and construction of this bunker was begun in 1953, at a time when the nuclear arms race of the Cold War was gaining momentum. Even though Yugoslavia was never a nuclear-armed nation itself, the fear of an atomic strike (whether by the West or the Soviet Union) ran deep. And so the bunker was conceived to provide shelter for Yugoslavia’s leader Tito, his family and an entourage of the inner circles of the military command and the government, 350 persons in total.
The official designation of the bunker was ARK D-0, the acronym ARK stands for either ‘Armijska Ratna Komanda’ (“Army War Command”) or ‘Atomska Ratna Komanda’ (“Atomic War Command”). Both can be found in various sources; which is correct I cannot say. Both seem plausible. The epithet “Tito’s Bunker” is only a nickname established since the bunker has been made accessible to the public. I guess it has better marketing potential than the dry official designation.
The project was so secret that legend has it that workers building the complex were driven to the site blindfolded and were only allowed to take the blindfolds off once inside the bunker. Only a small handful of people had full knowledge of the site, but they had to swear an oath to keep it secret.
Construction was complex and in the end took until 1979, so 26 years – and it cost allegedly in the region of 4.5 billion USD (about 20 billion in today’s money). When construction was completed, only a small contingent of about a dozen military personnel were stationed in the bunker to maintain it in a state of readiness should the need for its use arise.
The bunker was supposed to be able to withstand being hit by a 25 kiloton nuclear warhead. By the time the bunker was operational, most deployed warheads were much more powerful than that, so for the bunker’s safety secrecy was more important than the 200m of rock it is located under, or the reinforced concrete and the steel blast doors.
Whether Tito himself ever visited the bunker is contested. Some say of course he would have gone to inspect such a costly and significant site, others say he never got round to it. He wouldn’t have had much time to visit anyway, as he died in 1980, less than a year after the bunker’s completion.
Later the structure was mothballed, but kept intact for reanimation, just in case, and it remained a top secret. At the beginning of the Bosnian war in 1992, the Yugoslav military intended to blow the bunker up, but this was thwarted by individual military personnel sabotaging the plan by cutting the cable to the explosives the day before the intended destruction. Later the bunker fell into the hands of the Bosnian army, which used it as a storage place for supplies.
It wasn’t until 2011 that the existence of the bunker became public knowledge, in particular through a modern art project called “D-0 ARK Underground Biennale”. This was held repeatedly until 2019. Several works of art remain in the bunker on permanent display. It’s also thanks to this art project that the bunker became accessible to the general public. In 2014 the bunker was declared a National Monument.
Since the bunker is still part of a military complex (allegedly it’s located near an ammunition factory), advance permits are required and guided tours have to be booked ahead of time. Several tour operators offer tours that take care of the paperwork on behalf of clients – see details below.
As for the bunker itself, it has three main entrances at the front by the Neretva River, all concealed inside buildings constructed to look just like normal “harmless” residential cottages. Allegedly there were also a few secondary entrances/exits possibly only for emergencies. Behind the main entrances a curved access tunnel with heavy steel blast doors, both for protection against a nuclear blast, lead to the main part of the bunker.
The main corridor is roughly horseshoe-shaped and off it branch countless rooms and halls. The complex goes some 280m (920 feet) deep into the mountain and has a floor space of ca. 6500 square metres in total.
There are/were command centres, communications units, two conference halls, kitchens/canteens, fuel and food storage facilities, bathrooms, generators for electricity, air filtration systems and air-conditioning, a spare-parts workshop, and water was drawn from a special access tunnel to a mountain stream source. Equipment and supplies were supposedly enough for the 350 persons in the bunker to survive, cut off from the rest of the world, for a whole six months! (As usual, it still begs the question of “what then?”, i.e. when supplies have run out and all the personnel had to re-emerge into a potentially devastated nuclear wasteland …)
And of course there are the accommodation quarters. Most were simple with two-tier wooden bunk beds, but the rooms for Tito and his wife were more “luxurious” – or that’s what they are described as; but to me they didn’t look exactly like “luxury” (they reminded me more of Marienthal than of Enver Hoxha’s bunker).
Only parts of the bunker look more or less as they would have looked in 1979, many other sections have seen “interventions” through artists, whose work cover a great range of styles and approaches, from drawings to large installations. This may detract a bit from the place authenticity of the bunker, but it also adds some intriguing and often surprising extra elements.
What there is to see: When I visited the bunker it was part of a private all-day tour from Sarajevo with a driver-guide (booked through Funky Tours – see below). We first stopped by the bunker tour operator’s office in Konjic where our guide saw to the paperwork and registration. We then drove on to the gatehouse by the visitor car park in time for the first tour of the day at 9 a.m.; here we were handed over to the local guides. There were two coachloads of package tourists (one from Austria, as I noticed) and a few individuals and we all boarded buses provided by the operator to take us to the actual bunker entrance. There was a strict no-photography rule in force anywhere outdoors from the gatehouse to after we had entered the bunker. Hence I do not have any photos from the outside to show the “harmless” looking cottages that the entrances are hidden in.
Our crowd was divided into two groups, and our English-language tour had some 30 participants. The other group was similarly large. Because of that, the guides had to adapt the circuit through the bunker so as to avoid clashing with the other group. Hence I cannot say what the normal sequence would be. But it doesn’t matter so much anyway, as you soon lose orientation in the maze of rooms and corridors and just have to rely on the guide to lead the way.
We were first led to a generator room, which also doubled up as a (still well-stocked) spare-parts storage and workshop facility. We saw all manner of vintage electrical equipment (of often unknown purposes). Overhead the huge pipes are an indication of the inner workings and air filtration and supply. By the way, inside the bunker it’s a constant 22 degrees Celsius, so quite pleasant, really.
Along the corridors and in some rooms various works of art are on display, ranging from just little photos or drawings in frames on the walls to larger art installations. Little text panels provide some info about the artists involved (who came from a range of different countries).
In one meeting room an open briefcase was suspended from the ceiling, and in another otherwise bare room was an oversized, elongated chessboard. Whether that was for real or is also a piece of art, I could not determine. I didn’t get the explanations by the guide.
By the way, our female guide spoke good English, but was also a bit softly spoken, so when I was at the back of the group I sometimes struggled to hear her clearly enough.
Along the main but surprisingly narrow corridor, lots of rooms with two-tier bunk beds were lined up. Some with just one set of beds, others with two or four. Some rooms had additional tube TVs, others nothing more than a red telephone. The mattresses were covered with clear plastic sheets for protection.
The same was true for most of the furniture in what was supposed to be Tito’s private quarters, including his bedroom, bathroom, and office with an anteroom with two rows of chairs placed rather a bit too close together.
There are portraits of Tito on some of the walls, and at one point a blow-up photo of an Iraqi (!) postal stamp showing the image of Tito!
Old-style telephones feature in many rooms, with receivers on cables and manual dial disks – something that for the younger participants must have looked like something out of the Stone Age. For the older ones on the tour it had a definite retro-charm appeal. The same goes for some of the other vintage technology to be seen on the tour.
At the far end of the complex we entered one of the two conference halls (complete with another Tito portrait on the wood-panelled wall), where we had a little sit-down in the foldable armchairs, with writing pads attached, while the guide delivered her narration. This conference hall was also equipped with a screen and projectors that seemed to be more modern than the 1970s technology elsewhere. The seats too seemed to be newer (going by the fact that we were allowed to sit in them – everywhere else little signs reminded visitors not to use any of the original furniture).
At one point we ascended a staircase leading to an upper level that I had up to then been unaware of. One room was kind of an exhibition space including some strange things like a dodgy-seeming “gypsy map” of Yugoslavia as well as a red telephone with an upside-down dial disk.
Back along the other main corridor we got to see a room with about a dozen teleprinters lined up on little desks. It’s another type of technology that’s been completely replaced by computers. But remarkably these teleprinters are still in working order. The guide demonstrated this by running a roll of punched tape through one of the machines.
There’s other retro technology to be seen, including what looked like a field telephone exchange, and rooms stacked high with identical green electronic boxes of mysterious purposes. One room is dominated by floor-to-ceiling high racks of modules with thin cables. This our guide explained was where all the telephones in Yugoslavia could be tapped into (back then telephones were not yet omnipresent, not every household had one).
In the centre of the complex we visited the huge storage tanks, air filters and other technology in a high-ceilinged hall. At one point there was a sizeable art installation combining a large black-and-white blow-up photo of a woman with a pile of junk in front of it.
We passed a tiled decontamination room before being led to a tunnel running sideways to the main bunker complex. This leads to a water inlet, where pipes pump drinking water from an underground mountain stream. This surprised me, as outside the water could get contaminated. But maybe they used this source only in peacetime? And in the event of a crisis would have used storage tanks?
Back near the bunker entrance I noticed that the tunnel connecting the two main entrances to the main complex inside the mountain was “paved” with what looked like broken glass – evidently another larger-scale art installation.
Then we walked along the curved access tunnel back to the entrance through which we had entered 90 minutes earlier and reboarded the buses that took us back to the gatehouse/checkpoint. There, my wife and I reunited with our driver-guide from Funky Tours and set off back towards Sarajevo.
All in all, I thought the addition of a visit to the Tito Bunker was a brilliant extra combined with the Siege of Sarajevo tour afterwards. The old nuclear bunker has both a spooky, claustrophobic atmosphere plus plenty of insights into Cold-War-era paranoia, coupled with encounters with lots of vintage technology. And on top there’s the added works of modern art dotted around the complex for contrast. In the latter regard, Tito’s Bunker in Bosnia is not dissimilar to the BunkArt 1 site in Tirana, Albania. In other respects it reminded me more of Marienthal, which (with the absence of any art interventions) had a greater level of place authenticity, I thought. Whatever, for anybody with at least a vague interest in the Cold-War era and Tito-era Yugoslavia, a tour of the bunker has to be highly recommended. For others, especially those too young to have a connection to those bygone eras, maybe less so.
Location: in a secluded spot by the Neretva River in central Bosnia and Herzegovina not far from the small town of Konjic, roughly halfway between Sarajevo and Mostar.
Google Maps locators:
Office in Konjic (on Stara čaršija Street): [43.65154, 17.96146]
Car park for the beginning of the tour: [43.6317, 18.0009]
Actual entrance to the bunker: [43.6342, 17.9949]
Access and costs: restricted, by prearranged guided tour only; not too expensive, for what you get.
Details: You can apparently book visits individually through the bunker’s official website (titosbunker[dot]com) a minimum of 24 hours in advance, but better further ahead to be sure of securing a space on the tour, as it is evidently popular.
There are tours at 9 a.m., 12 noon and 3 p.m.; some sources say visits are only possible seasonally, so not in winter. And the number of tours on some days also varies, according to some sources. Better start planning well in advance. Some operators offer combined tickets with transfers from Konjic and can organize accommodation in Konjic, or offer the long transfers from Sarajevo or Mostar, some packages even include a lunch stop. If you book a tour with transfer from Konjic, you could even get there by train from Sarajevo.
The regular admission price for the bunker tour is 21 EUR (under 12-year-olds enter for free); the various packages with transfers obviously cost more.
When I visited the bunker it was as part of a combined “Tito’s Bunker and Siege-of-Sarajevo Tour” from Sarajevo, offered by Funky Tours (see sponsored page here!). It was a private tour for just my wife and me with a driver-guide who took us to the bunker and then drove us back to Sarajevo for the various elements of the Siege tour. The price for this combined tour was 75 EUR per person. Given that it was 8-9 hours on a private tour, with admission to the bunker included, I thought that was a very reasonable price indeed!
Photography inside the bunker is allowed, just not anywhere outdoors between the gatehouse/checkpoint and the entrance.
There are steps and one staircase so the place is not wheelchair-accessible, but otherwise no particularly good level of fitness and mobility is required. But you’ll be on your feet for a good hour and a half.
Time required: The guided tour of the bunker alone takes ca. 90 minutes plus check-in/registration for which you have to be there at least 30 minutes before the tour start. Add to that driving time: from Konjic it’s merely a good ten minutes. From Sarajevo the drive takes a bit over an hour, depending on traffic possibly even longer.
Combinations with other dark destinations: see under Bosnia and Herzegovina in general and under Sarajevo in particular.
For me the visit to Tito’s Bunker already came combined with a Siege-themed tour of Sarajevo, which was a very rich 8-9 hours all-day tour.
Combinations with non-dark destinations: Konjic is also a base for white-water rafting and other outdoors activities, for those into such things. Otherwise it has a pretty Ottoman-era bridge and a few other bits of appealing architecture and a reasonably good tourist infrastructure.
For other things see under Bosnia and Herzegovina in general.
