Muzej Tunel - Tunnel Museum: free audio guide
The story of Muzej Tunel - Tunnel Museum in Sarajevo, as the Votura app tells it on location. Read it here, or hear it on the spot with turn-by-turn walking directions.
Before you go
- Address
- Tuneli 1, 71210 Ilidža
The story
Tunnel Museum (Muzej Tunel) is a history museum built around one of the most dramatic survival stories of the Bosnian War: the Sarajevo Tunnel, also known as the Tunnel of Hope. The museum preserves the surviving entrance house at Tuneli 1 and the stretch of tunnel that connects the city with the outside world across the airport zone. During the Siege of Sarajevo, which lasts from 1992 to 1996, this passage becomes the city’s lifeline, allowing food, weapons, fuel, medicine, mail, and people to move when Sarajevo is cut off by surrounding forces.
The tunnel is excavated in 1993 under the direct control of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the work is carried out in extreme secrecy on both sides of the airport perimeter. It reaches about 800 meters in length, roughly 1 meter in width, and about 1.5 meters in height, a tight underground corridor that forces people to move bent over for much of the route. The museum’s preserved section lets visitors see the cramped wooden supports, the earth walls, and the practical engineering that keeps the passage usable under wartime pressure. For many visitors, the most striking fact is that this modest tunnel functions as a strategic artery for a besieged capital of more than 300,000 people trapped inside Sarajevo.
The site is especially powerful because it is not only a memorial but also a genuine wartime structure, tied directly to the families, soldiers, and civilians who rely on it in 1993 and 1994. The tunnel links the Dobrinja and Butmir areas, slipping beneath the runway area of Sarajevo Airport, which is under international control during the war. Because the passage is hidden, it becomes one of the most important logistical secrets of the conflict, and its existence is later revealed to the wider world after the war ends. The museum keeps that story alive through photographs, wartime objects, tools, uniforms, documents, and explanatory displays that turn a small private house into a historical witness.
One of the museum’s defining features is the original entrance house, a residential building that functions as the access point and later becomes part of the exhibition itself. Visitors can step into a narrow, sloping section of the tunnel and immediately grasp how difficult movement must have been, especially with supplies carried by hand or pushed on small carts. The preserved route is far shorter than the full wartime network that once included entrances, exits, and support points, but it offers a direct physical encounter with the siege. That physical reality matters: the Sarajevo Tunnel is not an abstract symbol, but a working wartime passage measured in meters, used under bombardment, siege conditions, and constant danger.
The museum stands as one of Sarajevo’s most visited memory sites because it explains survival through concrete, visible evidence rather than distant narration. Its story is inseparable from the broader Siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege of a capital city in modern European history, and from the people who keep the city functioning when roads, bridges, and open routes are cut. The preserved tunnel, the entrance house, and the museum exhibits together transform a hidden military necessity into a place of public history. For travelers interested in war history, urban resilience, or the Bosnian War, this is one of the most compelling and emotionally direct museums in the region.
Written for the Votura audio tour and read aloud in the app. Opening hours change, so check with the venue before you go.
Self-guided tours that stop at Muzej Tunel - Tunnel Museum
- Sarajevo Under Siege: Bridges, Tunnels, and Memory
- Sarajevo Under Siege: The Tunnel of Hope, Sniper Alley, and the City That Endured
- Sarajevo’s War-Touched Baščaršija: A Two-Day Walking Odyssey
- Fog, Ghosts, and the Old Town: A Two-Night Haunting Walk Through Sarajevo's Baščaršija
More audio tours in Sarajevo →
Hear it on the spot
Votura plays this guide when you reach Muzej Tunel - Tunnel Museum, then walks you to the next stop. Works offline.