PROTECT — hide the political city under the hill

10-Z is where a neat timeline would be dishonest. The shelter's own official history links the underground works to air-raid protection during the Nazi occupation, probably from late 1943 or 1944, but says the relevant municipal construction-office archive was likely destroyed. So the exact beginning is not fully documentable. What is clearer comes later: after 1948 the Czechoslovak military secretly rebuilt the complex as a nuclear fallout shelter intended for city and regional political leadership, commissioned in 1959 for roughly 500 people. The important object at street level is almost an anti-building: an entrance whose architecture is supposed to reveal as little as possible about the protected system behind it.