20190707_140123 A bunker entrance corridor

The bunker entrances have iron bar doors on them. The doors are always locked. So the closest look I could get inside was through the bars. This was the view I found.



As I mentioned before, when I visited my hometown, Vilnius, this time, I explored some nooks and crannies I haven't visited before. Sometime within the last year I heard there was a set of abandoned military bunkers somewhere in the city. So of course I had to go and find them.


I started looking for more information about them, and discovered that lo and behold, there is not one, but a few sets -- maybe 6 or 7 total -- of bunkers all around Vilnius. All of them were build around 1920-1930s by the Polish (that had occupied Vilnius at the time) to defend the city against the Soviets. That didn't work very well: when the Soviets invaded Vilnius, not a single shot was fired from the bunkers.


The first set of bunkers I visited was the easiest to find, and the easiest to find information about on the internet. They are located in the Sapieginė park, in the Antakalnis neighborhood, fairly close to the beginning of the exploratory path through the park (Sapieginės pažintinis takas). They face the path and are impossible to miss if you just follow the path.

This set of bunkers is currently inhabited by several endangered species of bats. They make their winter home here. For their protection the entrances into the bunkers have permanent bars on them; they stay locked even in summer when the bats are presumably elsewhere.


In this place, the bunkers come in pairs. All the pairs are located in the hillside along one of the main paths through the park. They were used for ammunition storage.

There are more pictures of the bunkers in Wikimedia.

July 2019