The Tunnel Museum near Sarajevo is no ordinary museum. It was no ordinary tunnel either.
For nearly three years during the siege by Serbian forces in the mid-1990s, this narrow, 800-metre passage under the airport provided Sarajevans with their only safe route in and out of the city.
It was dug by inveterate optimists using shovels, pickaxes and wheelbarrows. When it was completed in July 1993, its existence was supposed to be a secret, says Edis Kolar, but everyone in Sarajevo knew where it was. Every day, an average of 4,000 people passed through, many of them going out to buy food brought over the mountains from Croatia.
The tunnel's official purpose was to enable the Bosnian army to transport weapons to its forces inside the city. Civilians hoping to use it had a better chance of getting a pass if they had the right connections. So Edis was a particularly valuable friend during the war.
That was because the tunnel ran from underneath his family home to an exit in safe territory beyond the Serbian lines. "My mother was able to use it to go to buy food," he admits with a smile.
Edis was 17 and still in secondary school when the siege of Sarajevo began. Without hesitating, he quit his studies and joined the army. His unit was frequently sent to the front line. "You knew you were going to be sent to the front when the quality of the cigarettes you got improved. Whenever the Marlboros came out, people's hearts would sink." When Edis gets together with his friends, they talk about the events of the war and "laugh at the funny things that happened". If they had lost their ability to laugh, he says, they would have gone insane.
Before the war
Downtown, in a bar in Sarajevo's alluring Turkish Quarter, a barman about Edis's age says that he too fought in the front line, but he doesn't like to talk about it. Instead, he prefers to remember Sarajevo before the war, when tourists came in droves to experience the distinctive atmosphere of a city where Muslims, Croats, Serbs, Turks, Jews and others lived peacefully side by side - and, of course, to see the street corner where the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated before the outbreak of the first World War.
Now, more than seven years since the end of the siege, only a trickle of tourists have made their way back to Sarajevo. When I tell the barman I'm surprised by this, he shrugs and says: "We had a war here. People are afraid to come. It's understandable."
The notion that anyone who has ventured out of doors in an Irish town after midnight on a Saturday should be afraid to go to Sarajevo is an odd one. Even late on a weekend night the city centre belongs, not to drunken youths, but people of all generations who stroll up and down Ferhadija, the main pedestrian street, greeting relatives and friends along the way.
If you tire of walking, there's always a café close by, where most of the young people eschew alcohol in favour of those strong, espresso-like Turkish coffees. Sarajevo, its people seem to be saying, is doing all right, thank you very much.
Reconstruction projects
Yet the scars of war are not only evident, but shockingly so for the first-time visitor. Everywhere there are signs proclaiming internationally-funded reconstruction projects, but the city still looks as if the fighting ended only yesterday.
Prominent city-centre structures, such as the parliament building where citizens were fired upon at the start of the siege in April 1992, still bear gaping holes left by Serbian shells.
My landlady for the first night of my stay - an elderly woman who approached me at the bus station offering, with only a small degree of exaggeration, a "good apartment" in the city centre (it came close on both counts) - had given me a running commentary which consisted of pointing at buildings and declaring: "Kaput!" If you manage to avert your gaze from the battle-scarred buildings and focus on the footpaths, you'll see countless "Sarajevo Roses" - indentations where shells exploded, many of which have been filled in with red rubber.
The most striking sights of all, however, and the most poignant, are the cemeteries. Hemmed in on all sides, Sarajevans had to bury their 10,500 war dead in or close to the city centre. Many funerals were conducted at night, out of sight of the snipers in the surrounding mountains. Almost every green space became a cemetery, and the uniformly-sized white headstones used by the Muslim community are everywhere to be seen.
Testimony to the resilience of the population can be found in the craft shops of the Turkish Quarter, where, alongside hand-made coffee sets and jewellery, you'll find engraved cartridge shell-cases of various sizes, collected during the siege. (Don't try to bring them through Gatwick in your hand-luggage on the way home, as I did.) In a patisserie close to the craft shops, the owner asks me where I am from. When I say Ireland, his face lights up: "Ah! Robbie Keane! Tot-ten-ham." His careful pronunciation is like a personal provocation, Keane having left my own beloved Leeds United to join Tot-ten-ham.
"And Roy Keane," I reply, trying to move the conversation along. He looks puzzled for a moment before firmly correcting me: "No, Robbie Keane." (Mick McCarthy take note: Sarajevo, potential holiday destination where the locals do not seem to have heard of Roy Keane). The cake-shop owner at first assumes I am in Sarajevo as part of some international aid or reconstruction team, and is delighted to hear I am a tourist.
Family home
Edis Kolar, too, hopes the tourists will soon return to Sarajevo and provide the funds for him to develop the Tunnel Museum, which at present occupies two rooms of his family home. Weaponry and uniforms from the war are among the items on display. He also hopes, with state assistance, to rebuild the partly collapsed passage.
Visitors can, however, walk through the small part of the channel that remains. It is a chance, says Edis, to "see the impossible - how 300,000 citizens could survive, thanks to a small, hand-built tunnel".