The museum’s vicissitudes reflect the city’s ambiguous and ever-changing relationship with its own past. In 1917 the Austro-Hungarians erected a giant monument at the assassination site. Nearly two years later it was ripped down by the new Yugoslav authorities—though strangely a large central medallion from the monument, bearing the image of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, survives to this day in the basement of another Sarajevo gallery.
In 1930 a plaque was put up to celebrate Princip. In 1941 it was torn from the wall and given to Hitler for his 52nd birthday. After the second world war, Princip was claimed by the communists. Not only was the museum at the corner opened but the assassin’s fateful footsteps were set in the pavement. In 1992 they were destroyed and the museum shut: Princip had to go—Bosnian Muslims and Croats saw him as a Serbian hero. In 2004 a new plaque was unveiled. But it simply states the bare facts of what happened in 1914.
Continue reading the entire article from The Economist…
On Friday, the students from 2A took me to the Tunnel museum. We had to take the tram to the end of the tram line in Illija and walked to the Sarajevo suburb of Butmir, where the international aiport located. Only then, I understood why people told me to take the taxi to the Tunnel when I asked for the direction to get there by buses. We walk on the earthen road passing small houses and fields under the summer heat and the relentles sun rays for about half and hour.
And we arrived in front of a shattered house, the Tunnel Museum of the Kolar family.
The 800 meter long, 1 meter wide, and 1.60 meter high tunnel (I circle the tunnel on the below picture) was dugged in 1993, a year after the war began, providing the only safe land route for humanitarian aids and escape in and out of the city. Two of the students on this trip walked through this tunnel during the siege. One had to go to the doctor, and one had to go and live live with her uncle on the other side of the city. For 3 1/2 year, the city was under siege by the Bosnian Serb forces. A mixed Bosniak-Croat friend of mine told me that the reason for choosing the location of the tunnel was that people kept trying to escape by running on the airport runnaway and killed by snipers.
The part of the tunnel open for visitors was only 20 meter. It was a short walk underground, but I think that it was enough.
Tuneli 1
033 628 591
Open every day: 9:00 to 15:00
the first 1:30 mins is just plain boring. be patient.
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