Last Thursday the YES Abroad kids went on a field trip with
our history class to a nearby town called Konjic. Konjic is a the site of Josip Broz Tito’s Atomic Bunker. The
construction of the bunker lasted for 26 years, from March 1953 to September
1979, but Tito never once visited it. It was one of Yugoslavia’s best kept
secrets; our guide told us that workers were blindfolded when they were brought
to the building site to ensure that no one would know of the bunker’s
whereabouts.
Today the bunker is controlled by the Bosnian Ministry of
Defense and functions as both a tourist attraction and a contemporary art museum.
As our guide led us past at least 150 portraits of Tito we saw the air
conditioning room and went inside some sort of giant fan chamber (it’s hard to
explain), sat in conference halls, and past bedrooms that looked eerily similar
to the dorm I’ll have next year in college. It was, without a doubt, one of the
strangest field trips I have ever been on.
After the bunker, the whole class went out to lunch at a
restaurant overlooking the Neretva River. Lunch was followed by an hour and
half to explore the town and after a lovely day we hopped back on the bus and
headed for Sarajevo.
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