Željava

I’d had this one marked for a long time. From the moment I learned it existed — an entire air base built inside a mountain on the old Yugoslav border — I knew I’d go. Some places you stumble onto. This one I planned.

You meet the runway first: a long apron of cracked concrete laid out on a high plateau, grass coming up through the seams, the mountains of the Bosnian border standing around it. Then you see the mouth in the hillside, and you finally understand what you’re looking at. They didn’t build a hangar. They bored the hangar into the rock.

We drove in. Straight through the portal, car and all, into the mountain — and that’s the moment it gets you, when the daylight shrinks to a coin behind you and the tunnel just keeps going. The scale is impossible to photograph. Vaulted halls big enough to swallow jets, side galleries running off into the dark, water standing on the floor and throwing back the little light there is. You don’t explore a place like this so much as get swallowed by it.

You drive in, the daylight shrinks to a coin behind you, and the mountain simply closes over the top of you.

It was built to survive a nuclear strike — to keep fighter jets safe and ready underground while the surface burned. As a bonus, parked out near the runway, there’s an old aircraft going to graffiti and rust in the open air: the very thing all this rock was dug to protect.

The cost of feeling safe

It gave me the exact feeling I had standing in the NATO scatter station up in the Alps. Two enemies, the same instinct: pour unthinkable amounts of work, concrete and fear into the ground, just to feel safe for a while. One side flattened a mountaintop for antennas. The other hollowed a mountain out for planes. Mirror images, aimed at each other across a continent.

There’s something almost animal in it — this need to dig in, to hide what matters deepest underground, to be ready. We dress it up as engineering and strategy, but standing in that cold tunnel with water dripping somewhere in the dark, it feels older than any of that.

And then the war it was built for never came. The base was abandoned, partly blown on the way out, and the mountain got to keep the enormous hole we’d made in it. Now it’s just tunnels, and weather, and a few of us driving in with headlights to see how deep our fear once dug.