Few patches of pavement have had such disproportionate consequences for world history and this was also the site that I most wanted to see in Sarajevo. This plaque marks the street corner in the city where Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie on 28 June 1914. Princip fired twice at close range after their car stopped beside him, fatally wounding Sophie in the abdomen and Franz Ferdinand in the neck. The assassination triggered the July Crisis, which drew Europe’s competing alliances into the First World War just over a month later.
The site also has a connection with Adolf Hitler as a different plaque erected here in 1930 celebrated Gavrilo Princip as a herald of freedom, but it was removed after German forces occupied Sarajevo in April 1941. The plaque was presented to Hitler for his 52nd birthday and a photograph survives of him examining his new and rather historically loaded gift. It was later displayed in a Berlin museum before disappearing in 1945, adding yet another political interpretation to a street corner which has repeatedly been redesigned according to whoever happened to be in power.
The car displayed outside the museum is a replica rather than the vehicle in which the couple were travelling. Earlier that morning, another conspirator had thrown a grenade at the procession, injuring members of the following party. Franz Ferdinand later decided to visit the wounded in hospital, but the change of route was not properly communicated and his driver turned into the wrong street beside the Latin Bridge. The car stopped while attempting to correct the mistake, placing the couple almost directly in front of Princip. The original Gräf & Stift car is preserved at the Museum of Military History in Vienna, which I naturally failed to visit when I was there. It has now been added to the increasingly unmanageable list of places requiring a return journey.
The footprints are intended to mark the position from which Princip fired, although these are modern recreations rather than impressions surviving from 1914. Concrete footprints were first installed here in 1949, when socialist Yugoslavia presented Princip as an anti-imperialist freedom fighter. They were removed at the beginning of the Siege of Sarajevo in 1992 as interpretations of Princip and his legacy changed once again. The footprints were restored in 2022 and it was a strange sensation to stand in the marked position, looking at what is now an ordinary and busy street corner but also one of the most consequential locations in twentieth century history.
The building behind the plaque now houses the Museum of Sarajevo 1878–1918, but in 1914 it was occupied by Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen. We didn’t get a chance to visit this museum, but it’s one that I’ll likely pop into if I return to Sarajevo in the future. Anyway, it might not be the site that many people have on their bucket list to visit, but I’m pleased to get the chance to see this.