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. The violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s recast Princip’s legacy yet again, this time in the context of ethnic conflict. Reads: "From this Place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip expressed through his shots the peoples' protest against tyranny and the centuries long aspirations of our people for freedom." Socialist-era Sarajevo memorial site where Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke. 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. There, Princip was hailed as a national hero who had unified the South Slavs and freed them from foreign rule.īut as the political landscape of Europe changed, so too did the ways that Princip’s legacy was discussed and understood. 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. 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.Īs plots go, the assassination was one of the most successful ever conceived.
WHO SHOT ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND OF AUSTRIA FREE
By 1914, several independent states had already emerged in the Balkans, including a free Serbia. 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. 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. 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. 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. A drawing by Italian artist Achille Beltrame imagines Archduke Francis Ferdinand's assassination by Gavrilo Principīut while the assassin’s fate was settled quickly, the deaths of his prey were the trigger that began the First World War. Princip was promptly arrested and imprisoned, where he would die of tuberculosis in 1918. 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.
On June 28, 1914, one event changed the world.
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