The Trigger (25 page)

The Žerajić shooting started Princip on the path that would lead to the assassination of the Archduke. In this country, where history so often trips over itself, the 1914 assassination would take place in Sarajevo just a hundred yards away from where Žerajić shot his pistol on the Emperor’s Bridge four years earlier. But as Princip told Dr Pappenheim, he was ‘not yet ripe and independent enough’ to be able to consider such direct action. For Princip to complete his own transformation to radical assassin, he had one more important journey still to make.

Across the Drina River, which forms Bosnia’s eastern frontier, lay Serbia, the south-Slav nation that had recently won independence. It was small, with borders yet to satisfy the territorial ambitions of its rulers. It was new, with official recognition coming only in 1878 at the Berlin Congress following decades of rebellion, insurgency and uprising against Ottoman occupiers. It was also unstable, with a rivalry between royal houses so intense that in 1903 the King and his wife were murdered by mutinous army officers, attacked in their palace in Belgrade, their bodies disembowelled and defenestrated. But Serbia was free from foreign occupation, and that was what made it so important for Princip and millions of other south Slavs still under foreign occupation in the Balkans.

Princip – intense, secretive and private – told the trial that while he had started off reading Russian revolutionary texts, it was nationalism, specifically south-Slav nationalism, that he came to focus on. Serbia was the place where nationalism had delivered self-rule and so, after withdrawing from the Bosnian school system, Princip joined the growing stream of young Bosnians and others drawn there from across the Balkans. The Bosnian Serb boy from Herzegovina, who had been brought up listening to renditions around the fire of epic poems about medieval Serb heroics, set off in early 1912 to his ‘homeland’ for the first time, hitch-hiking, walking and taking public transport all the way to Belgrade. There he would complete not just his formal education, but his transition to full-blown assassin.

Before following Princip to Belgrade, I set out with my 1908 Sarajevo map to try and picture the city as he would have known it during his four years there as a schoolboy. Even though I was staying in the centre, the provincial character of this city meant that when I walked out onto the streets just before dawn I could hear cockerels crowing from smallholdings up the nearby flank of Mount Trebević. In the 1990s very different sounds came from the same mountain: the reports of Bosnian Serb artillery pieces firing into the city, although my diary reminded me that not all gunfire was life-threatening. During the football World Cup in 1994, soldiers on both sides fired their guns in the air in wild celebration when Germany, the nation that occupied Bosnia in the Second World War, was beaten by a fellow Balkan country, Bulgaria.

During the post-Second World War communist period in Sarajevo, tower blocks and apartment buildings bloomed where the valley widens into the zone ambitiously demarcated by the Austro-Hungarians as ‘New Sarajevo’. But with its steeply sided setting constraining its growth, the heart of the city remains remarkably unchanged. The skyline of twenty-first-century Sarajevo would be perfectly recognisable to one of Arthur Evans’s open-mouthed Bosnian bumpkins from the nineteenth century. Princip would certainly know his way around.

To reach Oprkanj Street, where Princip’s Sarajevo life had begun, I walked through the old bazaar quarter. The late-nineteenth-century decision by the Austro-Hungarian colonial planners to leave it alone, while modernising the rest of downtown Sarajevo, is a blessing for the modern city, providing a natural draw for visitors, whether local or foreign. The layout of the boulevards, the course of the river, the shape of the city’s hills all serve to funnel people towards Baščaršija, the Turkish name by which the market area is still known.

The mosques, with their ancient fountains, tombs and ritual fittings, are still very much in use, and as I explored I saw, within their precincts, groups of Bosnian Muslims going about their devotions just as earlier generations had. The older men passing through the gates were recognisable by the dark berets they wore on their heads, a last remnant of the days when costume was an ethnic identifier. In the women’s sections I could only snatch glimpses through open doors and latticework screens, but it was interesting to note that while I saw plenty of headscarfs, there were only a few full face-covering veils. Yet the market area’s main attraction was not religion, but what it has always been: the business of living. The baggy-trousered traders with sacks of spices might have gone, but the same web of alleyways remains, lined by stalls selling mobile-phone air time, memory sticks, football shirts, flip-flops and all the other bric-a-brac of modern life.

I had only known the market area when it was battered by shelling, its shops battened down and its stockrooms emptied by the Bosnian Serb siege that choked off supplies. Over the centuries the market has endured fire, plague, invasion and other crises, so back then the shop owners did what their forefathers had always done – they waited. In the summer of 1994 I was taken to one of the booths that was owned by the family of an Albanian jeweller. The shutters were down and it was closed, dank, dark and dusty, but there I was entrusted with a mission that spoke of an earlier age: smuggling a tiny package of gold out over Mount Igman for delivery to a family member who had managed to escape from Sarajevo to London.

The waiting game had clearly paid off, as Baščaršija was now heaving once more, youngsters with tattoos barging out of crowded bars, tables choking the alleys where the flagstones were freshly polished by the footfall of shoppers laden with purchases. And as throughout the city’s long history, Sarajevo wore well its Janus-like duality. Slices of pizza were being hawked loudly next to eateries selling burek, traditional Bosnian stuffed-pastry tubes prepared in vast, swirling spirals that Rebecca West described as ‘cartwheel tarts’.

While a few people, tourists mostly, sat on low cushioned benches smoking nargileh, my ear picked up a very un-Balkan sound. It was ‘Waka Waka’, the anthem of the 2010 football World Cup played in South Africa, spilling out of a bar nearby. A friend in Cape Town played bass on the track, so I took out my phone to send him a recording of his African beat being played in an un-African setting. As I fiddled with the buttons, the device buzzed to say it had picked up a wireless Internet network from the Hotel Europe, a name that I immediately recognised. During the siege it was a huge, burnt-out wreck memorable for the unfeasible number of refugees crammed within and for the busted ATM machine outside. It was the only one I ever found in Sarajevo, its fading VISA sign then a symbol of a city cut adrift from modernity. Now my mobile phone was like a compass guiding me to a new age, as I turned and looked up to find towering above me a very different Hotel Europe, completely refurbished, its façade partially clad in elegant glass, flags of various nations hanging ostentatiously above the portico. Sarajevo was about to host an international film festival, and the hotel staff were in a flap of final preparation for the arrival of their VVVIP guest, Angelina Jolie. I went inside and would have taken a drink on the terrace that was deliberately built with a view of the ancient Ottoman bazaar, only my filthy trekking gear felt rather inappropriate for the setting.

At the trial that followed the 1914 assassination Princip described Oprkanj as a ‘back street’, a description that still holds today. While visitors to Sarajevo’s old town flock to take photographs of the raised, latticed kiosk that caps the ornate Sebilj fountain in Pigeon Square, few ever wander up the crooked little lane one block to the east. It has none of the cafés and booths so prominent elsewhere in Baščaršija, just a few old houses and a boutique hotel with a rather cheesy name, the Villa Orient. A museum to Princip was once opened on this street, and I was able to find an old photograph of the bedroom that had been mocked up in the museum to display how Princip had once shared a room here with Danilo Ilić. In the picture you can see a single bed, a table to work on and kilims spread on the floor and hanging on the wall. There is also a large religious painting in the style of an Orthodox Christian icon – a strange choice for the room of a young man who under cross-examination at the trial described himself as ‘an atheist’. Today there is no trace of the museum. It was closed without fanfare decades ago.

You can take a tram from the top of Oprkanj Street, but to reach the site of the Merchants’ School there really is no need. The old centre of Sarajevo is so small that it took me only ten minutes to pick my way through the crowded bazaar and out along Ferhadija, the main pedestrian thoroughfare that connects the market with the street-grid laid out by the Austro-Hungarians. After a few hundred yards the school building was on my left, although no longer in use for education, the Merchants’ School having been rehoused elsewhere in the city long ago, rebranded as more of a business school.

It was a very tight stage on which the drama of Princip’s city life had played out, Sarajevo then reaching scarcely ten blocks at its longest point and only a few blocks across at its widest, all within the hilly frame of the Miljacka valley. With the street names retrieved from his school reports, I made a tour on foot. It took less than an hour to walk between all the addresses Princip was registered as using during his years in Sarajevo: Oprkanj, Franz Joseph, Upper Bjelava, Jezero, Mjedenica and Hadji Suleyman streets. Many of the buildings had been modernised, but all the roads were still there and I could picture Princip’s wanderings among them. The student who started out doing so well at school, posing so conventionally in his family portrait, walked these same lanes, smelled the same oily aroma of frying burek, dodged trams running along the same routes and watched the level of the Miljacka River chart, as it still does, the season’s passing from winter rage to summer’s slack water. And it was in Sarajevo’s school libraries, reading rooms and coffee houses that his growing anger against the Austro-Hungarian occupier slowly took form, from the dreamy utopianism of William Morris to the direct action of Bogdan Žerajić, who shot himself dead on a bridge over the river.

The most striking feature of my tour was that there was nothing to tell the visitor that Princip had ever been there. He was the Bosnian with the greatest impact on world history, and yet in today’s Bosnia there were no plaques or signs, nothing to record his many years living in the city before he headed to Belgrade.

Bosnian Muslim fighters who made it out alive when Srebrenica fell to the Bosnian Serbs, July 1995

Each anniversary of Srebrenica’s fall, newly-recovered remains of Bosnian Muslim victims are interred. In 2012, 520 were buried.

There is no record of the exact route through eastern Bosnia that Gavrilo Princip took in 1912 on his first journey to the Serbian capital of Belgrade, a distance from Sarajevo of roughly 120 miles. The rugged Bosnian terrain was then serviced by a few rough roads and a narrow-gauge railway, one the schoolboy artist Hans Fronius remembered his colonial grandfather building with ‘a hundred tunnels’. Although it is now closed, it was still functioning when Rebecca West travelled here in 1937, so she was able to take a train all the way to where the Drina River acts as the border between Bosnia and Serbia. In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon she described dozing in and out of sleep, the train moving in and out of daylight as it huffed its way through a ‘Swiss country of alps and pinewoods’.

When Princip was interviewed by the police in 1914 he used the word ‘mystical’ to describe his journey through this region. For centuries, stories of magic and spiritualism had been spun here, tales of superstition, the evil eye and individuals with powers beyond explanation. Princip’s mind, as he recounted during the trial, was then churning with the ideals of nationalism. In those early years of the twentieth century, nationalism still had about it a moral purity, an innate pride shared by peoples reclaiming a birthright long denied by foreign usurpers. It was such romantic thinking that underwrote the creation of the unified states of Germany and Italy in the late nineteenth century, a romanticism that had yet to morph into extremes of fascism with all its resulting horrors.

My mind was occupied by the sinister ways in which nationalism can be twisted, during my bus journey from Sarajevo to the north-Bosnian city of Tuzla just a few hours away. There I began the most emotional hike I have ever made. The route passed through exactly the same mountains Princip crossed, yet it was intimately connected to the brutal endgame of the war of the 1990s. It led to a place that will for ever be associated with nationalism contorted into its most toxic form. Three days of walking and camping took me to the town of Srebrenica.

Ore deposits rich with silver, or srebro as the locals call it, had been discovered hundreds of years earlier up a remote hilly valley in eastern Bosnia. It led to the founding of the town named after the precious metal sometime in the late Middle Ages. For centuries mining grew little beyond the artisanal level, although under Austro-Hungarian rule efforts were made to develop the industry properly. Foreign investors arrived in Srebrenica, changing the town name briefly to Edelbauer – a German name that translates as ‘Noble farmer’ – with colonial entrepreneurs setting up there one of the spa hotels so popular across the Habsburg Empire, where visitors could enjoy the medicinal effects of local waters laden with minerals. Investment fell away when the Austro-Hungarians left, and by the end of the twentieth century Srebrenica was a provincial town typical of eastern Bosnia, a bit rundown and tatty, but still large enough to be the focus of a substantial population based mostly in villages sprinkled over a landscape of forested valleys and high mountains. Unlike the three-way tug of war I had seen in towns like Glamoč in the west of Bosnia, eastern Bosnia had no meaningful Bosnian Croat population, making it a community shared by Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs. The skyline of Srebrenica reflected clearly enough which side dominated, with the bell-tower from a single Serbian Orthodox church set alongside several minarets.