Konjic // Staff to the Refund Counter
© John Bills
“What you are about to see was the best-kept secret in all of Yugoslavia. Not even the people living in the town knew about it until the 21st century. The people of Konjic had no idea that they were living next door to the most expensive construction project in the history of Yugoslavia, the third-biggest military installation and an underground world that was designed to keep Tito and his closest confidantes alive if the Cold War turned hot.”
Okay, we didn’t have such a speech before entering the secret complex known as Armijska Ratna Komanda D-0, but such monologues weren’t necessary. We knew why we were there, we knew what we were about to see. After all, Tito’s Secret Bunker isn’t a secret anymore.
That doesn’t make it any less awesome. I had visited the formerly secret but now-famous Tito Bunker a couple of years previous, in the before-Corona world, where I had the privilege of a private tour that meant I could ask all the questions that came into my cloudy head. We stopped in every room, marvelled at the scope of it all, took it all in. This visit was as part of a tour group, although the group in question numbered only three. Not quite the smallest plural, but pretty small.
© John Bills
Nobody has clicked on this link to hear about the size of tour groups. No, readers want the information, the gossip, the juicy telling of how the heck a nuclear bunker happened to exist on the side of a hill outside Konjic. Unfortunately, no simple answer conveys all that is needed there, but then again, this is Bosnia and Herzegovina. Simplicity doesn’t really exist.
But hey, I’m simple, so let’s give it a go. One look at a map tells you plenty about why Konjic was chosen. The town was one of the most central in Yugoslavia when it came to distance from the republic capitals, meaning anyone who was anyone would be able to get to the bunker in decent time, whether that meant coming from Ljubljana, Skopje, Belgrade of the rest. Once you’ve looked at the map, stop and consider the surroundings of Konjic. Notice all that landscape? No, you don’t, because the place is surrounded by mountains.
The entrance to the super awesome super secret high-tech nuclear bunker is fairly nondescript too, although one assumes it was more nondescript back in the day. We passed through a checkpoint on the way, albeit a checkpoint that didn’t involve anything more sinister than a dude wandering out of a building, checking my ticket and idly waving us on. We stopped outside three nondescript houses, where I was instructed to wait while my guide found the guide. Guides everywhere, and not a drop to drink.
© John Bills
The energetic guide gave us a brief overview of the bunker before we passed through the doors, heavy entrances built to withstand a 20-kiloton blast (Hiroshima was between 12 and 18 kilotons, for reference). Once we passed, the information kept on coming, but much of it was lost in a blur of amazement and fascination. It didn’t take long for all bearings to be lost, as we slowly made our way around the horseshoe layout, passing power generators, top-of-the-range electronics, air conditioning set-ups and all the rest.
After all, the place was constructed so as to allow Tito and up to 350 of his closest confidantes to continue living for six months, during which they would presumably plan a way for Yugoslavia to survive the nuclear holocaust that had happened outside. Tito demanded that the complex be constructed in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, as fears of impending global war grew. The bunker wasn’t finished until 1979, by which point more than $4 billion had been spent. In today’s money, that is around $15 billion. A lot of money, in short.
Was it money well spent? You could argue that spending $4 billion is never money well spent, but that’s a different chat for a different day. In terms of the complex itself? Everything was state of the art, perfectly constructed to ensure that Tito and his best buddies (colleagues really, but come on, you’d take your buddies down there) could survive and navigate Yugoslavia’s path out of the post-nuclear hellscape that would surely be raging on the surface. 6,000 neon lamps illuminating the whole thing. There are living quarters, furniture made out of oakwood, that sort of stuff. Tito’s furniture? That was made out of nutwood, obviously.
© Fotokon // Shutterstock.com
The great irony of the complex is that Tito never stepped foot inside. It was completed in 1979, just in time for Big Joe to pass away, and the nuclear war that was supposed to bring the world to its knees never materialised. Yugoslavia spent a huge amount of money building an underground complex that served no real purpose until its unveiling as a tourist attraction in 2011. Without wanting to be blunt, what a colossal waste of money. I want my money back.
16 soldiers were tasked with maintaining the place, and orders came to destroy it once war came to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. Only the quick thinking of two soldiers stopped that from happening, and it soon became a supply base for the BiH army.
There are two ways to think about Ark D-0 as you wander around its many blocks and myriad corridors. The first is detailed above, defined by considerations about worth and the money spent. This is a fundamentally cynical approach, despite my dedicating more than 800 words to it.
The other is to let the entire place wash over you, to get lost in its corridors, to get taken in by the scope of the project and the way in which it was realised. Human beings are incredible, even when creating to negate the worst of human behaviour. Heck, maybe they are most incredible at those times. We wandered the corridors of Tito’s Secret Bunker, admiring contemporary art and socialist planning all at once, as the facts continued to come from the guide and we lost whatever bearings we had left. The Cold War never did turn hot, but Armijska Ratna Komanda D-0 found a new purpose as a monument to ideology, engineering, planning and neurosis.
