The former anti-nuclear bunker of the Ministry of Internal Affairs

The tunnel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was built between 1981 and 1986 and it can be considered as one of the latest “great works” carried out by the communist regime within the project of bunkerization which started in the early 70s and led to the building of 175.000 bunkers of various sizes across the country. The bunkers were of three construction types: mountain sites, buildings and pits. The bunker of the Ministry of Internal Affairs is of the type “pit”, in fact was created by the Construction Enterprise 10 (a directorate of the Ministry of Construction that dealt with the construction of secret bunkers) that opened a large pit near the building of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (the Ministry building built in the 30s by the Italian project): after the implementation of the internal spaces, the upper structure was topped with a thick layer of reinforced concrete that reaches a thickness of 240 cm (thickness can be seen along the exit stairs).

This bunker, in code named “Objekti Shtylla”, consists of 24 rooms, an apartment reserved for the Minister of Internal Affairs and a large hall dedicated to intercommunications. Like many other bunkers of this size, this too was built to withstand a potential chemical and nuclear attack. Actually the bunker was never even used for trainings. The Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu as well as the dictator Enver Hoxha, who ordered its construction, never saw it finished because they both died before the construction of the bunker ended. The entrance and the exit of the bunker were built only recently, because on the initial project the entrance into the tunnel was possible only from within the Ministry.