On June 28, 1914, one event changed the world. A Bosnian-Serb youth Gavrilo Princip, aged only 19,
shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austrian throne,
and his wife Sophie as their motorcade passed by on the streets of Sarajevo.
Princip was promptly arrested and imprisoned, where he would die of tuberculosis in 1918.
But while the assassin s fate was quickly settled, the deaths of his prey were the trigger
that began the First World War. A cascade of diplomatic alliances among Europe s great powers
quickly drew almost the entire European continent, and ultimately the world, into a conflict that
would cost nearly 15 million lives and change the face of the planet for generations to come.
Legend tells that shortly before his death in prison, Princip inscribed a warning on the
walls of his cell: Our shadows will walk through Vienna, wander the court, frighten the lords.
In 2014, as preparations in Sarajevo were underway for the centennial anniversary of
the assassination, his warning proved apt. Event organizers struggled to navigate not only his
personal story and the immediate legacies of his actions, but also the various interpretations and
ideological positions that coopted the meaning of his short life over the following century.
The assassination itself was the realization of a plot by a youth group called Mlada Bosna (Young
Bosnia), populated mostly by Serb students dedicated to ending the Austro-Hungarian
occupation in Bosnia-Herzegovina that had begun in 1878. By 1914, several independent states
had already emerged in the Balkans, including a free Serbia. It was Princip s and Mlada
Bosna s ultimate ambition not only to liberate Bosnia-Herzegovina, but to realize its inclusion
into a larger, independent South Slav state with Serbia and other South Slavic peoples.
As plots go, the assassination was one of the most successful ever conceived. By its end, World War
I helped to bring on the collapse of the four East European empires (Austro-Hungarian, German,
Russian, and Ottoman), and the establishment of a number of new nation-states, including the Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. There, Princip was hailed as a national hero who had unified
the South Slavs and freed them from foreign rule. But as the political landscape of Europe changed,
so too did the ways that Princip s legacy was discussed and understood. In post-World War II
Yugoslavia, he came to embody the values of socialism, becoming a people s hero of
anti-imperialism who had liberated the masses from Austro-Hungarian oppression and exploitation.
The violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s recast Princip s legacy yet again, this time
in the context of ethnic conflict. In the wake of ethnic cleansing, it became common among Bosnian
Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) to interpret Princip in a way that spoke to their recent
experiences of ethnic violence. In particular, they reflected on his call for South Slav
unification as a thin veil for Greater Serbian ambitions and his affiliations with militant
Serbian extremist groups (such as the Black Hand or Unification or Death (Ujedinjenje ili smrt) as
evidence of the violent ends towards which they were prepared to go to reach their goals.
Conversely, Bosnian Serbs have largely continued to venerate Princip as a hero,
but his devotees have increasingly portrayed the 1914 assassination
as an act of national defense against those who intended to divide the South Slav peoples.
More than thirty years of regional ethnic politics since the breakup of Yugoslavia
have ensured that Princip s legacy has now been firmly caste along ethnic lines. As a result,
preparations for the 100th-year anniversary in 2014 were a heated affair.
Acutely aware that the centennial had become a prism through which more recent events were
being debated, official planners expressed their commitment to combat yet another of
Princip s legacies, that is, the perception of the Balkans as a hotbed of nationalism
and the volatile tinderbox of Europe. To challenge this view, Sarajevo planners
(in cooperation with various EU organizations) endeavored to diffuse tensions about the past
by holding a variety of events geared towards promoting peace in the future,
including art exhibitions and unveilings, sporting events, and youth activities.
But while organizers claimed to present a forward-looking global message of peace,
the events themselves showed how difficult it was to separate the commemorations of 1914 from more
recent events. A number of photo exhibits featured work by war photographers dating from 1992-5,
and the keynote performance by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra was presented in Vije?nica,
the city hall that was burned down in the 1990s and reopened only in May of 2014.
Over the course of the twentieth century, Princip s shadow indeed wandered,
his legacy becoming more a symbol than history appropriated and mythologized, coopted and
codified to reflect a variety of political persuasions, ideologies, and allegiances.
Perhaps Princip s strongest legacy then has been that he has served as a reflection
of our contemporary preoccupations. But whether it is Princip the terrorist
or Princip the great defender, the truth is lost in the political rhetoric.