A wartime air-raid shelter under the Upper Town, reopened as a public passage and permanently about fifteen degrees.
Under the hill that Gradec stands on there is a network of tunnels, and since 2016 you can walk through them.
Built for bombs
The Grič Tunnel was dug between 1943 and 1944 as an air-raid shelter, during the period when Zagreb was the capital of the Independent State of Croatia — the Ustaša puppet regime installed by the Axis — and Allied bombing was a genuine prospect.
It is around 350 metres long, with several branches and six entrances, and it could hold a large number of people.
What happened to it afterwards
Very little, for fifty years. It was sealed and forgotten.
During the 1991–95 war it was reopened as a shelter again, which is a short and unpleasant sentence to have to write about a building put up for the same purpose in 1943.
In 1993, in the middle of that war, it hosted what is remembered as Croatia’s first rave — a party called Under City held in a bomb shelter while the country was being shelled. Zagreb tells that story often, and it is a fair emblem of the nineties here.
Then it closed again until the city restored it and opened it as a public pedestrian passage in June 2016.
Going through it
It is plain: bare concrete, strip lighting, a slight echo, a level floor. There is no museum display and very little interpretation, and the lack of it is part of the effect.
It is used as a genuine shortcut between the lower town and Radićeva, and Zagreb people walk through it with shopping bags without giving it a thought.
The city programmes it for exhibitions, installations and events, and during Advent it is turned into an illuminated walk-through that is aimed squarely at children and is very popular.
Practical
Free and open daily, with long hours.
Entrances at Mesnička, Radićeva, Tomićeva (beside the funicular) and Stjepana Radića. Walking in at one end and out at another is the point.
Step-free, flat and wide, which makes it one of the few genuinely accessible routes between the levels of the old town.
Twenty minutes covers it. It is a short, odd, free thing to do in the middle of a walk between the funicular and the Stone Gate.
