“And above it is a citation from the Montenegrin poet Njegos,” says Hajdarpasic. Historian Edin Hajdarpasic of Loyola University says the inscription on the chapel refers to the assassins as heroes. He died in prison after being convicted of the assassination. Inside, Princip and most of his co-conspirators are buried in a small chapel. There’s a grungy cafe, and a highway overpass casts a shadow on the graves. People sell used books outside the cemetery fence. The site doesn’t look like a historic place of consequence. It reads: “From this place on 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia.”Īnd this isn’t the only place where the battle over Princip’s legacy is raging.Ī visit to Princip’s grave requires a taxi ride outside of the town center. Today, a resolutely apolitical plaque stands on the corner of where the assassination took place. Those were torn out during the Balkan war in the 1990s. Then World War II ended, and a plaque went up noting that this was “where Gavrilo Princip threw off the German occupiers,” says Lyon, “obviously with references to the recent war in mind.”įor a while, there were footprints in the sidewalk where tourists could stand in Princip’s shoes. There was a plaque in the 1930s that said Princip fired shots expressing the longing of people to be free. Lyon runs through about a half-dozen monuments that have been erected on this site, built up and torn down with each change in power. “Was Gavrilo Princip a terrorist, or was he a national hero? There have been tug-of-war interpretations, and they have changed over time.” “The question you’re faced with is very stark,” says historian James Lyon, an expert in Balkan history. That was the first in a long string of short-lived memorials to the assassination. And it was destroyed in 1918,” says Nazerovic. It was a monument with a very short life. In the one-room museum on the corner where the assassination took place, tour guide Mirsad Nazerovic points to a black-and-white photo of a pillar that used to stand outside this building. Today, the legacy of the Bosnian Serb nationalist remains the subject of intense debate - nowhere more than in Sarajevo itself. That event triggered World War I, charting the course for the 20th century. A 100 years ago Saturday, Gavrilo Princip shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.
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