How it looked in Soviet times.
The runway entrance. During a Civil War the retreating army destroyed what it could to prevent its use by enemy hands.
Posted on 10/21/2023 3:40:33 PM PDT by Libloather
A sprawling Soviet Cold War bunker built to withstand a 20-kilotonne nuclear blast but abandoned for decades is to be transformed into Europe's newest tourist attraction.
Carved into the side of a mountain on the border of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zeljava Underground Airbase was once one of the continent's largest military complexes.
But for decades it sat idle, after being abandoned in the Serbo-Croatian War in 1992, with only the occasional intrepid adventurer ever daring to venture into its crumbling cavernous core.
Now, plans are afoot to open the huge complex, which is nestled just a stone's throw from southern Europe's busiest national park, Europe Plitvice Lakes, to tourists - as haunting new images of the vast base were revealed.
Built in secret at a cost of $6billion in the 1960s to hide a fleet of Soviet fighter jets in what was then Yugoslavia - a socialist federation that sought a middle ground between Moscow and Washington during the Cold War - it had its own power, water purification and ventilation systems and could operate autonomously.
In its heyday, the bunker had five runways and could hold nearly 60 MiG-21 aircraft, with its 2.2 miles or so of tunnels also home to command centres, offices and dormitories for 1,000 Soviet troops.
The remains of the enormous 100-tonne retractable concrete doors at its four entrances are still visible with metal reinforcements protruding from the structures.
'All the systems were state-of-the-art at that time,' said Mirsad Fazlic, a former pilot who worked at the base for nearly a decade in the 1980s.
'It was the then best military and civilian technology.'
During the wars that followed the fall of Communism and breakup of Yugoslavia in 1990s, the facility was destroyed by the remnants of the Yugoslav army, using powerful explosives.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
20 kiloton? That’s like a detonator for a real bomb.
“Built in secret’
I always like the “secret” part of these stories when the authors have no idea we knew all about the item the entire time.
How it looked in Soviet times.
The runway entrance. During a Civil War the retreating army destroyed what it could to prevent its use by enemy hands.
I wonder if those tractors are copies of a Ford 8N tractor from the lend lease program during WWII?
“I wonder if those tractors are copies of a Ford 8N tractor from the lend lease program during WWII?”
They sure look like it.
This was a Yugoslav base--not a Soviet one.
(Yes, the planes were Soviet-made)
I may be wrong, but I’m skeptical that this was a ‘Soviet’ base. Yugoslavia was never part of the Warsaw Pact and had a fairly tempestuous relationship with the Soviet Union. During the early 1950s during the last days of Stalin, Yugoslavia came close to shooting wars with their Warsaw Pact neighbors. The relationship between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union may have thawed somewhat by the mid-1960s when this base was built, but I seriously doubt either trusted one another enough to permit a Soviet military base of this size to be built on Yugoslavian territory.
Yugoslavia was a communist dictatorship ruled by Marshal Tito from 1945 until his death in 1980. Tito was certainly less brutal than Stalin and probably slightly less brutal than later Soviet leaders, but that’s not a high bar. He undertook plenty of this sort of monumental building projects that every self-respecting megalomaniac communist dictator did. I’ve toured a nuclear-hardened bunker that Tito built outside of Sarajevo - sort of a less luxurious version of the Greenbrier.
The Yugoslav air force bought their top-line fighters from the Soviet Union, so there certainly could have been MiG’s housed at this base. They also had their own domestic aircraft industry and bought some aircraft from France during the cold war.
Again, I could be wrong but I have a strong guess that the base described in this article was a Yugoslav base, with aircraft that was sourced from the Soviet Union - and a young reporter who doesn’t know much about the Cold War just assumed it must be a Soviet base.
might be the same ones...
Yugoslavia certainly appeared the best of the communist countries with better and more everything for the ordinary citizen than their neighbors.
Reminds me of the Rebel base on Yavin’s moon from the original Star Wars.
I dunno. Why would the Soviets put all that effort out in that country? Tito didn’t love them.
The real question-did the US know about it’s existence?
The fighters pictured definitely have the Yugoslavia national flag (1946-1992) on the vertical stabilizers.
“Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send another.” - Marshall Tito to Stalin
Yes but you know how reporters are a bombshell report........
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