Croatia: Former Army Tunnels on Island of Vis Attract Tourists
BalkanTravellers.com
The island of Vis, which is the furthest inhabited island from the Croatian coast, was isolated from the outside world from the 1940s until 1991 when Croatia became independent, Reuters reported today. It served as a military base and boasted 20 kilometres of underground tunnels, caves, mines and storage facilities.
Having been ruled by the Greeks, Romans, Venetians, Austrians and Italians, Vis was eventually given to the newly created Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the 1920s. The relatively calm period that followed was interrupted by the Second World War, the island became the main hideout of the leader of the Yugoslav resistance movement, Josip Broz Tito, who later became the leader of Yugoslavia and stayed in power between 1953 and 1980.
Realizing Vis’s strategic importance and the usefulness of its many caves and coves from the years he spent on this island, Tito made it one of the main naval bases of the Yugoslav People's Army, the publication explained. This turned it into a closed military zone, out of reach for both Yugoslav civilians from the mainland, and for foreigners. The island's residents were even banned from many of its areas.
Preparing for war with Vis as the front-line, the publication wrote, the Yugoslav navy dug for decades and turned the island into a maze of caves, underground tunnels, bunkers and submarine hideouts.
The bases were abandoned in the early 1990s when Yugoslavia was falling apart and Croatia declared independence.
These locations have now become an attraction for both tourists and residents of the island.
“After they left, all of us teenagers of 16 and 17, we just had to go and explore something that was forbidden to our grandfathers and fathers for 30 to 50 years. They always put these bases on the most beautiful positions on the island,” tour guide Zvonk Brajcic, who grew up on the island as a teenager, told Reuters.
In addition to tourist sites, many of the tunnels have already been adopted for civilian uses, and some are now used as wine cellars.
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