The Trigger (21 page)

Princip was a little jumpy when he arrived here as a thirteen-year-old after his long journey on foot and by train. The trip had already extended his cultural horizons through exposure to other ethnic groups beyond the dirt-poor community of Bosnian Serb serfs where he had grown up. Reaching the city must have accelerated that process dramatically. Although small on the scale of twentieth-century Europe, Sarajevo was large enough to have been giddy-making for a boy from the rural hinterland. Vladimir Dedijer, the freedom-fighting author who was flown out wounded from Glamoč in 1943, collated anecdotes in his book, The Road to Sarajevo, about Princip’s early life. According to one, the young boy refused outright to stay in one guesthouse because it was run by a Bosnian Muslim innkeeper wearing the traditional costume of his community. ‘I do not wish to sleep there. They are Turks,’ the boy cried as he fled.

Lodging was eventually found for the young boy in the house of a Bosnian Serb widow, Stoja Ilić, who took in tenants at her home on Oprkanj Street. It was a lane on the edge of the city’s old bazaar quarter – narrow, twisting and just a stroll from where tinsmiths, carpet sellers, jewellers, saddle makers, coffee grinders, spice merchants and a slew of other traders had been noisily and fragrantly going about their business for hundreds of years. It would have been a thrilling place to explore for any new arrival: getting to know shortcuts through the network of alleyways; friendly traders offering a cheap treat, and grumpy ones to be avoided; the best spots to fish down on the river. And it would also have allowed the boy from an isolated Bosnian Serb community to feel the ethnic weave both of the city and of the wider country it represented, as he wandered lanes where the familiar Bosnian smell of meaty ćevapčići nuggets grilling over coals merged with the exotic aroma of flavoured tobacco from the Middle East being smoked through nargileh water-pipes.

Sarajevo’s merchants at the time faithfully reflected the city’s diversity, with Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews all firmly rooted in the trading community. Baedeker warned foreign visitors about the difficulties of price negotiations in the bazaar, saying ‘purchases cannot well be made without an interpreter’. To avoid the holy days observed by such a spread of faiths, Wednesday was kept as the official weekly market day; and early twentieth-century photographs, taken at roughly the time Princip was first nosing around, capture the bazaar thronged with sellers and buyers from outlying rural communities. The pictures show market alleys lined with walnut-faced farmers, their skin tempered by the extremes of weather, crouching in the dust next to sacks of fruit, herbs and other farm produce, as primitive weighing scales are hoisted shoulder-high to measure purchases.

Prices for dearer items such as gold might be negotiated in more discreet wooden jewellers’ booths erected as small shops running alongside the fronts of large stone storerooms dating from the early Ottoman era. The timberwork was often burned, destroyed and replaced during Sarajevo’s more turbulent spasms – a fate that would be repeated during the shelling of the 1990s – yet the substantial masonry warehouses behind were sturdy enough to survive. As I studied the photographs, my imagination projected a soundtrack of bells on a market caught between Europe and Asia Minor: tinkling bells from traditional Ottoman-style water sellers proffering drinks in polished metal cups holstered on their belts, and from modern trams announcing their departure back towards the railway terminus.

A few Western suits and modern hats are visible in the pictures, but traditional outfits from Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups dominate, lending an air of Eastern exoticism to what is geographically a European city. These costumes were not rare subjects that visiting photographers chose to highlight; but appeared standard for that time. Indeed as recently as 1937, when Rebecca West passed through Sarajevo on her first visit, she described seeing the same outfits: men from mountain communities in felt leggings, embroidered waistcoats and baggy trousers, their heads topped with an Ottoman-style fez or maybe a woollen cap or a swirl of cloth twisted into a turban. Dress was then used as a cultural indicator, and the different ethnic groups of Bosnia visiting the city clung proudly to the sartorial signature passed down from earlier generations. Women from Bosnian Muslim communities were pictured wearing veils over their heads, but many also had their faces covered completely by black cloth, without even a slit for eyes, nose or mouth. In the mid-1870s Arthur Evans recorded that, although Bosnia was the Ottoman Empire’s most distant western province, its public displays of adherence to Islam were so strong as to appear fanatical. ‘In Bosnia, in general, women are veiled and secluded as they are veiled and secluded nowhere else in Europe.’

The search for an education had drawn Princip to Sarajevo, and within a few days of his arrival he was taken by his older brother, Jovo, to enrol at school. The original newspaper notice that his brother spotted had promised places at the city’s Austro-Hungarian Military Academy and this is where the young boy would have started his education, had not a shopkeeper apparently intervened. According to Dedijer, Jovo had stopped to buy his younger brother fresh underwear and shirts, when the merchant told Jovo, ‘Do not give the child to an institution in which he will be uprooted and become an executioner of his own people.’ Only through the last-minute intervention of a politically minded shopkeeper did the young man who would bring down the Habsburgs avoid being indoctrinated as one of their imperial cadets. At the suggestion of the outfitter, Jovo looked elsewhere, arranging a place for his younger brother at the Merchants’ School, one of the many buildings on the city-centre grid so recently constructed by the Austro-Hungarians. The 1908 map places it close to the prominent Catholic Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, which itself had only been completed a few years before – a political statement by the city’s new Catholic occupiers: Western Christian bell-towers were to take their place on the Sarajevo skyline alongside those famous minarets. The first term of the school year did not start until September, so Princip had a few weeks in which to get to know the city that one day would be for ever linked to his name.

With the 1914 assassination having been the subject of intense scrutiny over the last hundred years, I had not expected to find new Princip material when I humped my gear off the tram that ran me into the city centre. Not only had generations of historians hunted the same quarry, but I was sensitive that many in the city might retain an uninterested, even hostile attitude towards the assassin. This seemed to explain the response I received the first morning after arriving, when I approached the board of the museum that stands next to the spot where the assassination took place.

They could not have been less interested. Phone calls went unreturned, messages ignored. I eventually managed to track down the chairman, but when I asked about the Merchants’ School he shrugged his shoulders. He did not know where in the city it had been located, had no interest in finding its records, and no, he did not have any ideas about any aspect of Princip’s life, beyond the few details on display in the museum. If I wanted to contact the museum again, I was to write formally in advance and wait until I was informed that my approach had been officially approved. Follow-up emails all went unanswered. It was very disappointing. A tour around the museum showed up errors in what little Princip material it held. Perhaps I would be better off looking elsewhere anyway.

The museum’s attitude chimed with a warning given to me by my oldest friend from Sarajevo, Amela Filipović. She is a lawyer whose life, like that of the entire city, had been put on hold by the turbulence of the war. To survive she had worked with foreign journalists as a translator, for a long time enduring the ghastly commute past snipers and mortar barrages to the Holiday Inn hotel, which for several years was Sarajevo’s journalistic hub. Even though it had been so long since we had last met, when I contacted her again she was kind enough to invite me to stay in her flat in the Skenderija district of central Sarajevo.

With her career now firmly back on track, running her own successful city-centre legal practice, Amela was about to take her daughter for a summer holiday down on the Adriatic coast, and I was welcome to use the guestroom. I had only visited her flat once during the war, at a time when her father, invalided through a stroke, was still living there – a particularly painful time for a family struggling for dignity and normality within the failing body of a besieged city. The surrounding slopes that had offered the city protection in the Ottoman era had become a source of menace, occupied by hostile Bosnian Serb forces and their artillery pieces; and nowhere more so than in Skenderija, which lies right at the foot of Mount Trebević, one of Sarajevo’s most dramatic peaks and one that was in the hands of Bosnian Serb forces for the duration of the war.

After greeting Amela warmly and looking around the beautifully refurbished apartment, among the reminiscences welling up between us was her recollection of my single visit here. ‘I remember it so well,’ she said. ‘It was the summer of 1994 and you brought us all supplies in your Land Rover. In particular, I will never forget the flowers that you gave us. You made a lot of people happy that day.’

It took hours to catch up properly, to hear about her father’s death, the troubled rebirth of the city following the Dayton peace treaty and all the resulting turns in her life. We took a stroll near her flat, and I complained about the problems I was having exploring the back-story of Princip. She tried to console me. ‘This is a city which does not look after its history properly. The city authorities are too focused on its politics now to care about anything in the past. Just look at that,’ she said, pointing at a muddled assortment of masonry fragments scattered across an abandoned piece of land that we were walking past. They were clearly ages old. ‘We have plenty of rich history here, but nobody bothers to look after it. Can you imagine this sort of thing in Britain? If these sorts of artefacts were in London, they would be displayed behind a fence with a sign explaining where they come from, not left like a rubbish dump.’

Determined to keep looking, and hoping that I might yet find new flotsam from Princip missed by earlier historians, I trooped between the many museums and archives that still exist in Sarajevo: the National Archive, the National Museum, the Museum of History, the Jewish Museum, the National Gallery, the Historical Archives and various sub-departments of the History Faculty at the city’s main university. It was a frustrating and, at times, disheartening experience. The librarian at the National Museum told me how the whole establishment was facing imminent closure because of a budgetary row along ethnic lines, between the complex governmental structures born in Bosnia out of the Dayton peace accord. When she showed me into the library the main door still had shrapnel damage from the 1990s, when mortar rounds detonated outside. Within a few weeks of my visit the museum’s doors would be closed; the librarian was owed a year’s salary.

My breakthrough finally came at the much smaller Historical Archives, a modest building I must have passed unknowingly many times during the war. It stands on the main road that led up to where the UN military headquarters had been located, although back in the 1990s the archive was as non-operational as the broken traffic lights a short walk away outside Bosnia’s presidency building. I remembered them hanging forlornly over a major junction, ignored by the occasional vehicle with enough fuel to be out on the roads. The archive director, Haris Zaimović, was a young man and I immediately warmed to his curiosity and enthusiasm. His positive response to my approach could not have been more different from that of the museum authorities I had been tangling with to date. When he told me that in the archive’s holdings were many of the original report books from the main Sarajevo schools set up during the Austro-Hungarian colonial period, I worked out the exact dates of Princip’s school years and, between us, we began a focused search. Within a short time we had retrieved the entire paper record of Princip’s secondary education in Bosnia.

Dedijer, the author whose work from the 1960s still dominates the received history of Princip, paints his early years in Sarajevo as ones of stability, both at school and where he lodged. Dedijer has him performing consistently in the classroom and staying in Sarajevo only with the widow, Ilić. ‘The first three years in the Merchants’ School were rather uneventful for Gavrilo,’ he wrote in The Road to Sarajevo. A different picture emerged from the original school reports that I found.

Hidden for more than a hundred years within Sarajevo’s shifting and sometimes arcane network of officialdom, the reports catalogue in meticulous detail a student going off the rails. The fall of this Gabriel begins after he performed brilliantly in his first school year in Sarajevo, an exemplary A-grade student, but one for whom stability was clearly lacking. The documents show his address changing six times in four years as he roamed rootless and often penniless, supported by a scholarship for only part of one of his four completed school years. By the time Princip finally left school in Sarajevo, the student whose first-year performance was given a First Class Diploma with Honours (the highest possible ranking allowed for by the Austro-Hungarian education system) was now rated D in most subjects. His absenteeism surged to 199 lessons missed, and he was obliged to resit that year’s final examination in Latin. These rediscovered school reports provided the clearest evidence of the teenage transformation undergone by Princip.

After so much research filtered through books by others, it was electrifying to have in front of me the 1907–8 school-year report for pupil number 32 of Class Ib of Trgovačka Škola u Sarajevu, the First Grade of the city’s Merchants’ School. The file had been glued inside a marbled ledger, the cover page bearing an official stamp in purpling ink from the headmaster’s office. On a grid the class’s ten teachers had each written down the subjects they taught and had signed their names in swirly, occasionally blotchy ink from a fountain pen. The maths teacher, Mr I. Kurtović, had got into a muddle and signed his name twice, the second version imperfectly erased. Maths would clearly be useful at a school for students intending careers in commerce, but the spread of subjects taught to Princip in this first year of secondary school went way beyond standard business matters.