Bosnia Marks Centenary of Sarajevo Assassination

Bosnia on Saturday is staging a range of cultural events to mark the centenary of the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian Serb revolutionary Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914, although Serb politicians are staging parallel commorations.

The central event in Sarajevo is a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic in the recently re-opened Vijecnica, the historic City Hall, which was recently refurbished after being shelled in the 1990s war.

Among several exhibitions in the Bosnian capital to mark the centenary, one of the displays, ‘Assassination in Sarajevo’, will be on show for the day in front of the main cathedral in the city’s central pedestrian area, featuring photographs that document Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie’s visit to the city on the day that they were murdered.

Bosnian Serb political leaders unveiled a new statue of Gavrilo Princip, in the city of East Sarajevo. The new life-size statue of Princip stands in the centre of East Sarajevo, a city in Bosnia’s Serb-led entity Republika Srpska, adjacent to the capital.

Meanwhile in Andricgrad, the mini-town created by film-maker Emir Kusturica in Visegrad in eastern Bosnia, Serb political leaders from both Bosnia and Serbia will hold a rival set of events including the unveiling of a mosaic celebrating Princip, who the organisers describe as a hero. 

In the town of Grahovo in north-west Bosnia, Princip’s birthplace, the Serb authorities are opening his reconstructed family house, after a new statue of the assassin was unveiled in East Sarajevo on Friday. 

While many Serbs see Princip as a hero, many Croats consider him a terrorist, and schools in former Yugoslav countries teach different histories about the causes of the 1914-18 war, reflecting...

Continue reading on: