James Lyon, Ph.D., author of the upcoming book “Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914: The Outbreak of the Great War." The Apollo was showing ‘A Shot at Midnight,’ and the Imperial ‘A World Without Men,” said Dr. "The weekend that the archduke and Sophie visited Sarajevo the movie theaters were showing two films that foreshadowed the horrible events that would follow. The archduke visited Sarajevo despite warnings of anti-Austro-Hungarian sentiment among the Serbian population of the city. Sophie was aristocratic but not royal, so her marriage came with restrictions-their children had no right to aspire the throne and she could not appear at Ferdinand’s side at most major events. Princip, 19, was such an amateur assassin that he testified that he looked away when he fired.įerdinand was the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and because of a tangle of alliances, Princip’s shots quickly escalated into the The Great War.Īrchduke Ferdinand enjoyed traveling to the outposts of the empire, where protocol rules were much more relaxed than in Vienna, where his wife, a Bohemian countess, was deemed unsuitable for the dynasty, according to Habsburg rule. The archduke was assassinated along with his beloved wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. There was an heir to an empire, a royal couple in love, the wife resented by the ruling family, a clandestine group known as the “Black Hand,” careless security officials, a warning not passed along, nationalistic teenagers ready to die, a wrong turn, cyanide pills and a lucky shot. Princip was arrested immediately after the assassination and died in captivity a few months before the war ended in what is now the Czech Republic.— - The shot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand 100 years ago today - which started a bloodletting that didn’t stop until 10 million people died and four empires were ruined in World War I - had all the elements of an exaggerated “Game of Thrones” script. World War I would eventually cost some 14 million lives, including 5 million civilians and 9 million military personnel. ![]() ![]() Milorad Dodik, a Bosnian Serb leader present at the monument unveiling said that the statue's inauguration amounted to "fighting for freedom today." Sarajevo last year marked 100 years since the assassination, but Serbian and Bosnian Serb leaders shunned the event on account of Princip's divisive legacy. At the outbreak of World War I, most Muslims and Croats preferred to stay a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Serbs in Bosnia regard Princip as a hero, while the nation's Croats and Muslims widely view him as a killer and nationalist who sought to have Bosnia occupied by Serbia. Princip's legacy has long been a source of controversy in the Balkans, a region still sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, and which emerged from an ethnically fueled war in the 1990s that followed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The Ottoman Empire, Britain and later Italy and the United States also joined the fighting. Princip, a Serbian nationalist opposed to the Austrian-Hungarian empire's occupation of his country, shot dead Ferdinand, heir to the imperial throne, on Jin Sarajevo, precipitating the chain of events that sent Europe tumbling into World War I.Īustria held Serbia responsible for the assassination of the Archduke, and with the support of Germany, Austria attacked Serbia, whose allies, Russia and France, were soon entangled in the conflict. To the many outside of Serbia who view Princip as a terrorist, Nikolic said, "others can think what they want." "Gavrilo Princip was a hero, a symbol of the idea of freedom, the assassin of tyrants and the carrier of the European idea of liberation from slavery," Nikolic told the crowd. "Today, we are not afraid of the truth," Nikolic said. Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic described Princip as a freedom fighter and a hero. ![]() ![]() Gavrilo Princip, whose two-meter bronze likeness was unveiled before a crowd of hundreds in central Belgrade still fuels controversy in the ethnically-divided Balkans. Serbia on Sunday inaugurated a monument to the man whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand ignited World War I.
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