July 8, 2013
The Sveti Ilija Tunnel in central-southern Croatia was officially opened. This tunnel carries the D76 state road through a 5,387-foot (1,642-meter)-tall mountain ridge known as Sveti Ilija (Saint Elijah). This ridge, which is part of the Biokovo mountain range, was named after a prophet in the Old Testament. The Sveti Ilija Tunnel serves as a connection between the village of Bast in the municipality of Baška Voda on the south side; and the village of Rastovac in the municipality of Zagvozd on the north side.
Construction on the Sveti Ilija Tunnel began on March 25, 2008, with Ivan Galič serving as the project’s chief engineer. A pivotal moment took place on January 21, 2010, when workers boring through the planned structure from both the southern and northern directions finally met up with each other. In reporting on this breakthrough in the next day’s edition of the Croatian and Bosnian-Herzegovinian daily newspaper Večernji list, Maja Pejković-Kaćanski also highlighted the expectations of local residents that the new tunnel would make it possible for “their area to flourish, tourism to develop, production facilities to open, and foreign investors to come.”
About eight years after the inauguration of the Sveti Ilija Tunnel, Roman Ozimec incorporated both specific content and a larger context when describing this structure in his work Guide Through Biokovo. He noted, “The tunnel consists of a main pipe 4238 meters [13,037 feet] and a auxiliary one 4255.62 meters [13,961.9 feet], which makes it the 4th longest in Croatia.” Ozimec further stated, “The tunnel is slightly sloping from the hinterland towards the coast, and at half of the tunnel it is at 293 meters [961.3 feet] above sea level.”
Photo Credit: Mario Žamić (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)
For more information on Sveti Ilija Tunnel, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sveti_Ilija_Tunnel
A video of this tunnel can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jXxkfw_qxk
Transportation History 
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