“It was using that machine,” says Michał, “that the scientists based here were the first in Poland to determine that something had gone seriously wrong in the Chernobyl region.”Īs an indication that anybody in the bunker might be in it for the long haul, cookbooks were provided.
Beyond the preponderance of everyday items, attention naturally falls on the heavyweight communications systems, gas masks, and mysterious dials and gauges. For all that, the atmosphere is anything but ordinary. Trapped in time, it’s a room bristling with keepsakes from the Communist period: lumpy armchairs the colour of chocolate and mandarin, yellowing newspapers, sellotaped spectacles and half-smoked packets of Klubowe cigarettes. TFNĪccessed via a series of hermitically-sealed doors, some weighing as much as 300 kilograms, visits to Alfa begin by passing dark decontamination chambers and disquieting posters detailing emergency procedures before opening out onto what was formerly the command centre. Understood to have been one of the most hi-tech laboratories at the time in Poland, there are rumours of Anthrax tests. Drawing a mixed bag of urban explorers, military enthusiasts and history fiends, these occasional meet-ups have become a staple for those looking to immerse themselves in the dark heart of Poland’s not-so-distant past. Now rented out to Michał Kępiński of the Foundation for Historical Education, it’s been on Michał’s initiative that Alfa has found itself intermittently opened for sightseeing tours. When it was operational scientists working in Alfa were among the first to learn that all was not well at Chernobyl. Located on the grounds of the Military Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, today this bunker has come to be recognized as one of the city’s lesser-known touristic gems, not to mention a remarkable memorial to the Cold War years. Thought to have been completed in 1977, it was to form the vanguard of the country’s medical operation in the event of a Third World War, with some urban myths going so far as to suggest that it remained fully operational until 2010. Declassified only as recently as 2014, Alfa, just to the west of the capital’s Powązki Cemetery, was one such place. In Poland, the grim reality of those paranoid times physically manifested itself in the aggressive construction of fallout shelters, and whilst many were built with the public in mind, others served more secretive purposes. With the Soviet Union cracking its knuckles on the side lines, the world braced itself for a chain reaction that could tip the planet towards a nuclear apocalypse.
Marked with solemnity this Thursday just gone, the 37th anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law was a pointed reminder of just how close Poland teetered on the edge of civil war – and worse. A series of doors, some of them weighing 300 kilograms, protect Alfa from the outside world.
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