Original subtitles

Narrator: A complex with an explosive past

now lying forgotten in the woods.

The most fascinating structures are these round cylinders

with reinforced ribs on the outside.

This was highly specialised.

Grand coastal defences in Ghana

that are stark reminders of the brutal trade in slaves.

When you see the extent of these fortifications,

how many there are and how solid they are constructed,

the first question that comes to your mind is why here?

What was so valuable?

A huge hidden nuclear bunker in Florida usa.

Just this vast cavernous chamber echoes with every footfall

and clearly meant to house something really important.

And a decaying giant

that was once at the heart of Serbia's industrial revolution.

It was supposed to symbolise a new future for the country,

a new hope for the people.

But this specific site would play a part

in the country's history that no one could have foreseen.

Crumbling remains and ruins of lost worlds,

they were shaped by extraordinary events

and are now haunted by the past.

Their secrets are waiting to be revealed.

Hidden from view,

deep in the forests of western Poland,

a peculiar group of buildings stretch out

over a colossal site.

To start off, you're just in the forest

but you begin to realise that man has been here

and left quite a Mark,

it begins with little things, railway tracks,

odd bits and pieces but then gradually,

it begins to reveal more and more buildings,

they're everywhere.

The buildings you first come to

just look like something out of a Sci-Fi movie,

they're these giant concrete structures

that seem to be on these legs that could come alive at any time.

Very, very well-constructed but when you look down from above,

they're absolutely open to the elements,

there's no roof,

it's clearly a very unique structure.

And then you turn a corner and there's a different building,

more rectangular structure.

This is so abandoned,

there's very little that can tell you

what the purpose of this was

except that some kind of industrial enterprise was here

but you can't tell what it was.

But what can be discovered

by travelling a little deeper into the forest?

There are these big open basins and they look corroded

in some kind of way

and there's channels leading from them,

so there was action not just above ground but also below.

While its original purpose may be unclear,

one thing is certain.

This is a complex of buildings that shouldn't be in a forest,

this is an urban kind of complex,

there's something secretive and special

that's going on here and some people have put

a lot of effort to hide this very substantial complex away.

With railway tracks stretching through the forest,

this site was clearly of major importance.

We have this large complex

spread over a large landscape of buildings

with old rail lines, trees intergrown everywhere,

you're only seeing a fraction at the first glance.

This is a really, really big operation.

There's a railway that terminates there,

so there was obviously a lot of goods

either coming in or going out of this place

but what were they?

Radoslaw domke is a historian

from the nearby university of zielona gora.

For many years,

he has been researching the buildings here

to try and uncover the mysteries that surround them.

This round were for transporting er, coal to, to power plant.

Coal give energy for this whole object.

When you look at the power plant

and you think about the amount of coal,

the amount of fuel that's coming in to this place,

there's clearly a need to make a lot of electricity,

this is a very power-hungry manufacturing process,

whatever's going on here.

The railway didn't only serve the power plant,

at the other end of the site, there are structures

that are central to understanding this place's true purpose.

When you're looking at this object,

it's hard to know function about this building,

you have to have very specific knowledge about engineering.

For many Poles, even from the West Side of Poland,

this place is a huge secret that people don't realise

that it was so important, that it was so dangerous.

The unusual design served a very important function.

What you are seeing here, it's silos,

it was very dangerous material here inside the silo,

and that's why this construction is so hard and monumental.

If you look around,

you can see that in the case of explosion,

the blast will go up.

It minimalise victims around the area.

This was a vast explosives manufacturing plant

with this distinctive feature at its very heart.

These are not small silos,

the space is utterly vast, which is mind-boggling at the moment

but it's even more mind-boggling to think that this vast space

was full of explosives.

There was, of course, the ever-present risk

of a terrible accident,

so the layout of the whole place was designed with safety in mind.

Obviously, making explosives is not without its dangers,

so it makes perfect sense

that you're going to locate a munitions factory

far away from towns and villages,

but not only that you're going to put the separate elements

of the factory far apart.

The chemicals needed to make munitions are highly reactive,

they're designed to explode because in their raw state,

in their early state, they're really hard to control.

Moving this highly unstable material from place to place,

you wanted to be as smooth as possible

and the railway lines are the best way to do that.

But a few important questions remain.

Who was manufacturing explosives on such a vast scale?

And why did they want to keep it a secret?

The history here is rooted in the continent's darkest days

during the second world war.

Hitler had these very ambitious plans

to have this huge production of explosives

and huge production of munitions for the German reich.

Once the war begins, and the Germans had seized Poland,

now they can actually create

this new system of industrial enterprises.

This was one of its centrepieces,

the christianstadt dynamite factory.

It was originally owned by dag,

a company that was founded

by the inventor of dynamite himself, Alfred nobel.

At its peak,

it was producing more than 6,500 tonnes of explosives every month.

The things that they were making at this factory are mind-boggling.

There's evidence that they were making rdx,

which is more explosive than tnt.

This baby goes boom.

And you have got so much of it being stored.

And also there's suspicion that they made Nitroglycerin.

Now, Nitroglycerin is one of the most explosive chemicals there is.

I've only ever seen it in tiny vials,

let alone giant vats.

While the scale of the complex is staggering,

there was an even darker side to the whole operation.

Making ammunitions is dangerous work,

so you would think the people making it

would be highly-trained professionals

with years of experience right?

No.

Here, you've got forced labour so these are ordinary people,

prisoners of war,

they were made to make these ammunitions

that were then potentially

going to be used on their own people.

For those forced to work here, life was almost unbearable.

The conditions were terrible, it was very unhealthy to work here,

to work in that kind of industry and also the treatment of guards,

because if they want to be aggressive

against the prisoner or worker, they did.

Not only disease, not only conditions,

but the treatment of the crew was very dangerous for life.

If somebody tried to escape,

if somebody tried any defiance, they could be executed on the spot

without any difficulty,

and you just simply get another slave labourer.

Hitler's Nazi's seemed to have designed the complex perfectly

for maximum efficiency.

That changed one early morning in 1944.

Very little documentation about this site survives

but one fact we do know was there was a massive explosion,

which given the war, makes you think about sabotage.

If it was sabotage then who was responsible?

It was before the workers started

and it only hit some of the key buildings.

We may never know what actually happened here

but with a forced workforce

and active Polish resistance in the area,

if you put two and two together from that,

you get an inside job

and that's what led to this act of sabotage,

these explosions, and bringing about a stop

to the manufacture of weapons here.

Contemporary reports suggest that during 1944 and 1945,

no fewer than three separate unexplained explosions

caused major damage at christianstadt.

But when the war ended,

the Nazi's destroyed most of the documentation

detailing what went on here.

All items of value were looted by the invading Russians

and eventually the buildings were abandoned to the forest.

Today, it's all parkland open to the public

and very few visitors here know the secrets that surround it.

I have two feelings.

One feeling is admiring of this, the genial engineering thought,

the huge monumental buildings,

but on the other hand, my grandfather was a prisoner

and I know the condition of living in a camp

during the second world war, so the second feeling is sadness.

People worked in very bad conditions here

and it was very ungood for them health,

for their lives and for their families.

Beneath an innocuous-looking mound of earth

near the east coast of Florida in the usa

is a long-forgotten relic.

Just off a freeway and hidden amongst the trees,

you've got this sort of stepped white wall

leading to just quite a plain white door.

You realise maybe that door

is hiding something quite intriguing.

You got this thick concrete wall

and then on top of this low little hill,

you have these various ventilation shafts to something under here,

something that was important at one time,

but today there's no sign of what that was.

As you go through the big steel doors,

you're met with a second security zone,

like a decontamination chamber.

Whatever was in here, it certainly meant business.

But what was the purpose of this bizarre structure?

And what threats would it face?

One thing that's really striking here

is the whole thing is built with these large steel beams,

they look strong enough to support a sky scraper or a stadium

and yet all that's above this is just a grassy mound.

So there's an impressive array

of structural protection on display here,

obviously, all designed to shelter what was inside.

Just this vast cavernous chamber that echoes with every footfall,

and clearly meant to house something really important.

What was all this built to conceal and from whom?

This site, which was located near to the Kennedy space centre

dates back to the time of the space race

and an era of worrying uncertainty for the entire world.

This bunker was built in 1967, the height of the cold war,

though it might not seem like a military centre,

but it was close to Cuba,

which is an area that we always worried

might have nuclear weapons and, of course,

in the Cuban missile crisis

that was all about trying to get Russia

to remove nuclear weapons from Cuba.

What's interesting about this bunker, is its orientation,

'cause if you expand to look at the larger area,

you'll notice that the main entrance

and the exposed part of the bunker is facing away

from the Kennedy centre.

Now, the reason for this is if there was any attack,

the Kennedy centre is the most likely location,

so if you face away from it, you're gonna be better protected.

That wasn't the only remarkable thing here.

The level of all-round protection was unprecedented.

Mark oxley is an expert on the history of the site.

So this isn't your normal nuclear fallout bunker.

This is actually something a little bit different,

it was hardened to such a degree

that the outside walls are 18 inches thick,

but some of the interior walls go as thick as 48 inches.

The foundation was also nine feet thick.

The heavy use of metal in the structure

tells us that it was designed for something else.

But what you'll notice is right up here,

this was actually one of at&t's

and the department of defence's communications bunkers.

The goal of this bunker

was to keep the hardened communications

of both the at&t long distance long lines

as well as the military's autovon network secure

in case of nuclear war.

In the aftermath of a nuclear attack,

it was feared that people would swamp the telephone exchange

as they tried to reach loved ones.

But the military would need guaranteed open telephone lines

to coordinate its response.

Enter the autovon network and its priority status.

The autovon network ran parallel

to the normal communications network.

This was a way for the defence department

and the executive branch to maintain communication

between key defence agencies and key military assets

during a crisis.

The bunker was just one small part of a much larger project.

So there are these bunkers scattered around the United States,

from coast to coast,

and they're all, like, 75 or 100 miles apart

in this intricate web around the country.

At&t actually built three different kinds of bunkers,

one type was full of communications equipment,

another type had power-generating equipment

and the third type had microwave equipment,

and microwave link can send telephone data

across the open air without having to be connected by wire,

so you can imagine how that could be very valuable

in the aftermath of a war.

While it would have seen unimaginable destruction across the land,

a nuclear blast wasn't the real danger

for a place like this.

That was the resulting electromagnetic pulse,

which would have wiped out electrical equipment

for miles around.

So, how would the site and its operators have survived down here

in the aftermath of nuclear armageddon?

Being inside this structure is kind of like

being inside of a steel cage and that's important

because one of the risks of a nuclear war

is that when a nuclear weapon goes off in the atmosphere,

it sends out this bolt of electricity

that could destroy electronics for hundreds of miles away,

so if you want to protect your sensitive electrical equipment,

you want to put it inside a cage of metal,

a Faraday cage,

and that's exactly what they did here.

A Faraday cage,

it can be something as simple as chicken wire,

it's just a metal mesh and what it does,

is it basically neutralises electrical charges,

so inside of the bunker,

you'll have your people or any equipment

and all of that is protected from anything else

that will be going on outside.

While protecting the equipment was the purpose of the bunker,

it would have all been for nothing

if there was no one left alive to operate it.

It had to be habitable even in the event of a nuclear attack.

There are large cans of powdered butter,

powdered eggs, spaghetti, meat sauce,

I mean, all kinds of things,

and those were meant to sustain five people,

five workers within this facility for 30 days, 24/7.

The men here would never have left the bunker,

it would have gone in to lockdown

until those inside were notified that it was safe to go outside.

So this is one of the radiation detectors,

basically these are planted all around the facility,

both on top of the facility and below the facility,

they were meant to detect gamma radiation,

so in case of a nuclear strike or nuclear event in the area,

this would basically send a signal to the remote monitoring station

and automatically close all the blast doors in the facility,

and turn the carbon air filtration systems on

to ensure that the air quality was preserved

inside the facility.

Once the blast doors were shut,

access to and from the bunker would have been strictly controlled.

So if you had entered after a radioactive event,

there would be these massive lead-lined doors

blocking your entrance into the facility.

So what you'd have to do

is you would be in your decontamination suit

and you'd be entering what is known as the decontamination shower.

This is where you would rinse off all of the radioactive particles

that were on you,

so that you wouldn't be traipsing them

into the main clean environment.

That was critical to ensure

that everybody who was inside stayed alive.

But would the people garrisoned here ever be called in to action?

And how would the site find a new strategic importance

in the future?

Imagine the job that these people were asked to do,

you go and you live in this bunker,

you're waiting for a nuclear war

you desperately hope would never happen.

If it did happen, you'd have to wonder

was your family and everyone you know wiped out?

Meanwhile, you've got this difficult task to perform

and they were expected to stay on that station

and run these communications for up to a month

after any potential conflict.

Fortunately, the men inside never faced

such a desperate situation.

And in 1979, as a new and improved system

was being rolled out across the country,

the military abandoned the bunkers for good.

Today, a new use has been found

for this extraordinary place, as Mark explains.

Everything today is Internet-based,

the Internet of things is everywhere,

everybody relies on their cell phones heavily,

GPS navigation,

it has to be processed where there's a lot of power

and a lot of processors

and that would happen in a data centre like this one.

The bunker is being prepped for that next stage of its life.

As a place to securely store row upon row of servers.

And with hacking and climate change

both potential challenges in the future,

it is not the only one of its kind being repurposed.

This cold war relic is now being imitated

all around the world among america's peer advisories

in order to secure their data from anything

that might bring down a vitally important network

and compromise the security of the state.

Along the stunning coastline of Ghana are striking buildings

that dominate the surroundings.

There are these enormous white buildings

sat high above the coastline,

they're almost like palaces with elaborate staircases,

plazas and archways, hugely impressive.

As you go up the coast,

you see there's more than one of these

rising from the cliff faces,

some of them are just rubble now but others are in pretty good shape.

They were built to last.

When you get closer to the buildings,

it's clear that these buildings were built

for defensive purposes

but it's not only how they're positioned,

it's the canons, it's the firepower.

But behind the imposing walls

are scenes that paint a confusing picture.

The deeper one goes into the building the more one finds.

There's a whole hidden world right under the surface.

The darkness is all-consuming,

the air is thick and heavy, damp and decay is all around,

shackles rattle on the walls

and thick steel doors cover tiny enclaves.

It's such an odd place,

the contrast is so enormous between the floors above ground,

the opulence of them, the sense of space and light,

the beautiful views of the shore and the ocean,

and then underground it's a vertical dungeon.

So what were these places designed for?

The answer lies in a period of great European expansion.

During the 15th century,

seafaring traders began to arrive on the shores of Ghana.

They would alter forever the course of history in Western Africa.

These white forts are legacies of those first landings long ago.

The first colonisers were the Portuguese,

south western Europeans with the knowledge,

the experience, and the national purpose

to embark on the enterprise of developing oceanic trade roots

with Africa and Asia.

They'd come to find raw materials

but what they stumbled upon was beyond their wildest dreams.

The akan peoples of the coast

had access to considerable supplies of gold

and they are willing to trade it to Europeans

for base metals, textiles and other manufactured goods.

The coast became so valuable

that the Portuguese referred to it simply as 'miner', 'the mine'.

More poetically, the English later named it the gold coast.

The Portuguese were willing to do whatever they could

to defend the gold, so they did whatever it took,

including building these fortifications.

These are Ghana's coastal forts,

a string of imposing defences built by powerful European empires.

Alex Kingsley okpei is a local historian here.

We are here in one of the oldest European structures

along the west African coast called the elmina castle,

constructed by the Portuguese in 1482.

This castle was built with materials from Portugal and then Holland.

See how thick the walls are, formidable, impregnable,

made not to withstand attacks.

These forts were built to be intimidating,

four outer towers formed the batteries,

cannons stretched all along the front

and huge towering walls Rose up from the rocks below.

It would have been a huge undertaking,

but it was essential to keep other European powers away

and ensure that the local people only sold their gold

to agents of the Portuguese crown.

These forts accomplished exactly what they were designed to.

We know from records that up to 1550,

the Portuguese were getting up to 12,400 ounces of gold annually,

which was a sizable proportion of gold

coming into Europe at the time.

But soon other European powers would try to muscle in on the scene.

The Portuguese had something

that many other countries wanted for themselves.

The Netherlands, Spain, england, France,

they all coveted the wealth

that was pouring out of the gold coast,

and they were willing to fight tooth and nail

to get their hands on the share of it.

By the 17th century,

the Portuguese couldn't fight them off anymore

and their domination came to an end.

With the market now open to all,

different nations built their own forts

and battled to protect trade in their area.

In total, there were around 40 forts along this coastline

owned by different nations.

They stretched for more than 300 miles.

The trade these forts were protecting was also changing.

As across the world,

the market for a new commodity was beginning to flourish.

It came from the lush tropical islands of the Caribbean.

Sugar was hugely desirable and fetched a very high price,

Europeans couldn't get enough of it.

The problem was that it was very difficult to produce,

you needed a very large, very dependable labour force

and the Caribbean and the Americas just didn't have that anymore.

You had an indigenous population

that had been decimated by disease,

so they weren't available for this type of labour,

and even the poorest Europeans

were unwilling to brave the expensive passage

and the terrible living and working conditions

for the meagre salary

that working on a sugar plantation would fetch.

However, in the eyes of the European powers,

that labour force could be found in Ghana

and the countries beside it.

The trade in gold was now making way for the trade in people.

The wealth that would be opened up by the slave trade,

in terms of labour to produce raw commodities,

really created tremendous wealth

in terms of trading people, labourers.

But back across the Atlantic,

on the western coast of Africa,

there was a steady supply of labour

that the Europeans were willing to do anything to obtain,

provided there was a profit in it and the profits would be immense.

Michele: Europeans are able to come in

and exploit instability in Africa

in getting slave labour that would be sent to the Americas.

At the heart of this new trade were the forts.

We are standing within the infamous cape coast castle.

Built by the British around 1664.

It was built during the slave trade, infamous slave trade,

and within these, we have deep dungeons

where the mills were kept.

I know about 1,000 were kept at a time

and live in very horrible conditions, they were tight,

packed together like sardines.

Little air for them to breathe, little water for them to drink,

no good for them, no medical attention.

They slept on the floor,

where they slept that's where they ate,

that's where they defecated,

that's where they urinated.

The conditions were horrific

and a large percentage of the slaves died

before they even got on the boat.

Men and women were kept separately

but the treatment of women was no better.

In fact for some, it was even worse.

We are within the female slave dungeons.

Within this one,

between 200 and 300 young ladies were kept here.

On top, you could be taken out, sexually abused and bought back.

A greater number of the female slaves

were used as sex slaves,

so through these dungeons, women of substance, women of honour,

women of value had to keep quiet and endure all the atrocities,

because they had no power of their own,

they had no strength,

they had no voice, everything had been taken from them,

who were they going to call?

Who was going to respond to their call?

Like many of the other forts,

cape coast castle was a place of extreme contrasts.

A few yards, a few metres away

from these cavernous dungeons are airy light rooms

with parquet floors,

elaborate furnishings and scenic vistas

that the people involved,

who would profit off of the slave trade,

where they lived.

It is horrendous to think that they just went about

their normal day to day lives completely detached

from the unfathomable human suffering

they were consciously inflicting just metres away.

What fate lay in store for those suffering

the unspeakable conditions of the Ghanaian castles.

Over some 300 years, an estimated 12.5 million africans

were shipped to the new world.

And so, this was the final

point of call of their captives,

if you survived your stay here,

eventually this where you're going to go through,

whether male or female, they call it door of no return.

Out here, then to a boat, carried away,

transferred in to a ship

and then carried to the Americas and the caribbeans.

This was the scene of one of the worst institutions

in human history, if not the absolute worst.

The cruelty is almost unimaginable

and it continued all the way up until 1814,

not that long ago really.

The slave trade was ended during the 19th century

but it was only during the decline of the British empire

in the 20th century

that these forts and the land they stood on

were finally handed back to the local people.

For years, the castle's involvement in slavery

was a taboo subject in Ghana.

But now the people are showing more interest in their history.

In fact, Ghanaians themselves account for 70%

of tourist numbers at the forts.

It really is a heritage site of its own,

in terms of its meaning, its significance, these forts,

they're so important because people need to know what happened

and they stand as stark reminders

of how human beings can treat other human beings.

In Belgrade, the capital of Serbia,

there is a damaged structure that was once at the birth

of a new age in the country's history.

This place looks like it's been to hell and back,

like it's been torn up from the inside out.

The stairs look like they're ready to snap

under the weight of the first visitor

and the whole place looks as though it's ready to collapse.

Nature is gradually consuming this place,

birds are nesting in it,

trees are growing out of the walls

and the earth is swallowing the place up.

This place looks like if it's hit by a powerful storm,

then a whole chain reaction of destructive events

will be set off in here.

It's a miracle really that it's still standing.

It's clearly got a story to tell

but that story has become buried under years of waste,

there's even a boat lost under a sea of trash.

There are other buildings around here, too,

the place clearly isn't alone

and there's tracks linking it to these other structures,

so we're looking at just one small part

of a very vast industrial edifice.

This place was once a monument to a bright future

but the level of destruction here tells a different story.

The place has clearly been through the wars,

you can tell that immense change took place here.

The thing about this place is

it was supposed to symbolise a new future for the country,

a new hope for the people.

But what unfolded here was in fact a disastrous setback

and a devastating tragedy.

Buried amongst the rubble and waste

are the origins of a ground-breaking moment

in the modern history of Serbia.

Serbia had been under the rule of the ottoman empire

since the 15th century

and in 1878, it finally got its independence.

They had effectively been a slave state

under the ottoman empire

and now, suddenly the shackles had been thrown off

and the country had the opportunity to make some progress.

Structures like this were the result

and a portent of what was to come.

At the time that Serbia gained its independence,

everything was relatively small scale,

this wasn't a heavily urbanised country,

it wasn't in any way an industrialised country.

But under the rule of the new king in Serbia,

investment from abroad was allowed.

He had grand plans for the future of his country.

This building was going to be a central part

of making that huge jump from agricultural nation

to an industrial nation.

This was the Belgrade sugar refinery.

There was sugar beet being produced and they saw an opportunity.

This could be exploited

and used to fuel their industrial revolution.

As local expert, ljubisa ristic explains,

this meant the beginning of a new Belgrade.

It was very important for the city

and that complex with the apartment buildings

for the thousands of people who used to work here.

It must be a very big change and actually this industry produced

a situation to start other industries.

You can just imagine what it was like back then.

The din of the machines working,

the employees hustling through going about their business.

For those involved, this must have felt really exciting.

The plan was to attract vast numbers of workers

to kick-start growth in the city

but there were troubles from the very start.

Ljubisa: In a few years, this company failed

and they actually asked for protection, bankruptcy,

you know, and the Serbian state took over

and from that on, it was actually owned by state.

Financial concerns weren't the only problems.

A campaign for workers' rights would soon lead

to a dramatic and bloody confrontation outside the gates.

The amount of change that industrialisation caused

was enormous but it was also the speed of that change.

One day it wasn't here,

and you've got a largely agricultural society and economy,

and the next day, you've got full-scale industry.

You're now working according to the clock

and according to the demands of whoever's running the factory,

and not everyone is going to take to that very easily

and with good reason.

All across the Balkans,

the changes that accompanied industrialisation

were accelerating the demand for workers' rights.

Belgrade is going to see this earliest and heaviest,

'cause it's the first place in the country

to witness heavy industrialisation.

And the struggle that's fought here is gonna symbolise the struggle

that will soon consume the whole country.

Wherever there are differences,

wherever there are people making more than others,

there will be tensions and this was no exception.

By February 1907,

the plight of the workers finally became desperate.

The records aren't exactly clear

but basically, the German owners failed to comply

or reneged on agreements relating to working conditions

and rates of pay.

So a group of workers went to the factory management

to issue them a warning,

honour your agreement or we'll strike.

Unfortunately, this push for rights or pay,

soon turned in to a tragedy.

The battle lines were drawn and the owners wouldn't back down.

Nor would the 400 workers who opted to go on strike.

The workers occupied the factory, they stopped working,

police came, they had strike guards

and then everything, and after some days,

all these negotiations and everything,

they crashed the strike with firearms.

On 14 march, following 18 days of stalemate,

the standoff came to an end and violence erupted.

Picketers were soon arming themselves

with metal bars, iron spikes,

some even had knives or handguns.

We've all seen pictures,

television showing what happens in events like these,

there are crowds on both side, emotions are high,

there's a lot of yelling, a lot of shouting.

Violence is sometimes inevitable in these circumstances.

And the shooting started,

they were trying to arrest some leaders of the strike.

It was very dramatic because it was lot of workers,

lot of police, lot of army, lot of families,

lot of kids and it was at the end, a bloody end.

Four workers were killed in the violence,

the factory owners were eventually forced to agree

to improve conditions for workers.

But it soon became apparent

they had no intention of keeping their word.

The strike ended in defeat but it set an important precedent.

We can see it as the beginning

of the true socialist movement in Serbia,

and the battle fought there is going to be continued on

for decades to come across the country.

The refinery survived the first encounter unscathed

and was back in use straight away

but just down the line was world war I and world war ii,

then Soviet rule,

this country was in for a tough time in the 20th century.

The sugar refinery was repaired,

modified and rebuilt over the years

as a result of wars and foreign occupation.

But it has somehow come to define the story of Serbia.

It finally closed its doors in 1983.

Against all the odds,

the refinery has since had a colourful second life

as an arts and theatre venue,

ljubisa has been heavily involved

in shaping this positive new role for the building in Serbian life.

We found ourselves with a theatre here with no subsidies,

with no way how to survive

and we started to organise these rave parties,

and this became very famous

for the people like Goldie from London, like David guetta,

like junior Jack, like Bob sinclair,

everybody from the mtv still, you know, came here.

We had a lot of big, big parties for three, four, 5,000 people.

And so this building,

which symbolises a key moment in Serbia's social history,

now has a new bright future to look forward to.

Finally, city and the government came to us

and said now we will make a huge biggest cultural centre here

and that's what's going on at this very moment,

and we are very happy about that.

Now, they are abandoned crumbling ruins...

..Many remind us of dark times...

..But some were once beacons of hope and progress.

Lasting testimonies to human imagination, enterprise and spirit.

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV