Princip's Footprints

The Museum of the Austro-Hungarian Period: Sarajevo 1878-1918 had only opened a few years before. Housed, appropriately enough, in an Austro-Hungarian building on the north bank of the Miljacka river, it faced onto Obala Kulina Bana street and the Latin Bridge. It was here that Gavrilo Princip had fired the shots which killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia. For many years, there had been a pair of footprints cast in a paving slab which marked the exact spot where the Serbian assassin stood on the morning of 28 June 1914. These disappeared in 1992. Shelled, sniped at and nearly starved out by Serbs, the Sarajevans changed their minds about Princip. Before, when every Sarajevan was also a Yugoslavian, the gawky student from Belgrade had seemed, if not a hero, then at least a foolhardy patriot. He had struck a blow for independence from the Austro-Hungarians and set in train the series of events which led to both the demise of the Empire and the unification of the southern Slavs in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. During the siege, however, the Sarajevans had come to regard Princip as just another Serbian ultra-nationalist, much like the ones firing on them from the hills and imprisoning them in their own city. Circumstances transformed the assassin. While communist historians had co-opted him as an anti-imperialist and a pre-revolutionary revolutionary, many Sarajevans now bracketed him with Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic. Some also pointed out that, even if the assassination had been motivated by a desire for freedom and independence, it had also been the catalyst for the First World War. Restoring the commemorative footprints might reignite the suspicions of those who believed the Balkans to be a ‘powder keg’, a danger to the rest of Europe, a chaos whose conflicts would inevitably spread. In 2009, the only problem with not reinstating the footprints was that Sarajevo was no longer a city under siege in a civil war. It was the capital of a country which incorporated the Republika Srpska where thousands of Bosnian Serbs continued to regard Princip as a hero.

            The museum took a diplomatic line. Outside, a stone in the wall carried an impeccably factual inscription: ‘From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia.’ A screen beside it showed a clip from a TV dramatisation, an English one, with Edward Fox as the ill-fated archduke. Inside, the exhibits attempted to tell the story of Austro-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia from the Ottoman Empire in 1878 without offending anyone. There was no mention of the chronic economic decay which afflicted the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century. Nor was there anything to suggest that the Austro-Hungarians had annexed Bosnia out of self-interest, expanding the buffer zone which, like a prototype of the Iron Curtain, ran from Hungary to the Adriatic and protected them from the purportedly dangerous East. Instead there were bursts of information about the complex administrative structure and technological advances the Austro-Hungarians had introduced. A caption admitted that trams and electric street lighting arrived in Sarajevo much earlier than in the rest of the Habsburg domains because the authorities wanted to test them on the dispensable Bosnians before they exposed the good citizens of Vienna and Budapest to such potentially dangerous innovations. Beneath grainy black-and-white photographs of the Serbian conspirators was the gun which Princip had used to shoot the archduke: the starting pistol of the First World War. Three other guns used by the gang had ended up in Vienna; this, presumably, was the fourth and ‘missing’ weapon. Beside it was the paving slab with the concrete footprints, as much a relic of the siege as a memorial to the assassin.

Tom Phillips