Authors: Tim Butcher
As Serbia grew, so did the confidence of the hardliners, peaking with the annexation crisis of 1908 when Austria–Hungary formalised its occupation of Bosnia and declared it sovereign Habsburg territory. Ardent nationalists in Serbia, many of whom belonged to the army’s officer corps, demanded military action as crowds of young men took to the streets of Belgrade vowing to use force to take on the Austro-Hungarians in order to win freedom for the significant population of fellow Serbs in Bosnia. Serbian paramilitary groups were set up with the explicit purpose of fomenting nationalist uprisings in Bosnia, and secret smuggling channels were established to move agents, propaganda material and weapons across the Drina River.
When it became clear in early 1909 that Russia was not at that time willing to send its forces to support Serbia in a war with Austria–Hungary, the Belgrade government had no choice other than to accept the annexation. It was too weak to fight an offensive war by itself, so the crowds on the streets were dispersed and the order given for the paramilitary groups to be disbanded. It was an instance of bitter realpolitik, one that would leave deep scars in political opinion, with nationalist hardliners incensed by what they regarded as a betrayal of the Serbian cause by traitorous elements within their own government. Throughout the twentieth century the same divisions would return, not least at the end of the Bosnian War when Slobodan Milošević would be accused by hardliners of betrayal for eventually signing the Dayton peace treaty in 1995.
Following the annexation, the diehards were driven underground, covertly maintaining their ambition for military action in the name of the Serbian national cause. One such small but powerful secret group, which had been closely involved in the killing of the monarch in 1903, vowed to keep up the fight for the Serbian national cause. It was called Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, which translates as ‘Union or Death’, its members sworn to secrecy through the making of a blood-oath, its literature adorned with the skull-and-crossbones motif of Serbian freedom fighters. The group would play an important role in the run-up to the 1914 assassination and is better known by its shorthand name of Crna Ruka, or ‘Black Hand’.
By the time Princip arrived in 1912, a new focus was opening up for Serb nationalism, a frontline to the south, against the old enemy that had been confronted in the nineteenth century, the Ottomans. The independent country of Serbia recognised in 1878 had been established in only a small portion of territory claimed by the Serbs. Across its southern border, in land still occupied by the Ottomans, lay what nationalists in Belgrade referred to as Old Serbia, an area with many of the oldest religious sites venerated by the Serbian Orthodox Church dating from the Middle Ages and a large local Serbian population. The drums of war were beating again in Belgrade, and this time gradualism would not restrain them. The Ottoman enemy was then a weakened and friendless imperial power, confronted not just by Serbia, but by several other Balkan nations willing to fight. Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro all had territorial ambitions to win back what they regarded as their own territory, which had been occupied by the Ottomans for centuries. The four nations formed an alliance and in October 1912 the First Balkan War began. It took only a few months to drive the Turks out of Europe once and for all.
This was the febrile atmosphere that Princip encountered when he reached Belgrade for the first time. The slight seventeen-year-old, whose anger against the Austro-Hungarian occupiers of his homeland had been turned to fury by the suicide of the failed assassin Bogdan Žerajić, was able to watch close up as fellow south Slavs took action to push back an occupier. Clutching his bundle of books, he made a rushed attempt in June 1912 to pass the Fifth Grade exams at the First Male Gymnasium in Belgrade. He failed, his mind elsewhere, as other young Bosnians streamed through Belgrade to enlist in the Serbian army and paramilitary groups about to attack the Ottomans. After turning eighteen Princip tried to join them, but after taking part in basic training his application was turned down. Under cross-examination at his trial in 1914 he said he was rejected because he had fallen ill, but he was more candid when later interviewed in his cell by the psychiatrist. ‘Wanted to go into the Balkan War, but was found too weak,’ Dr Pappenheim recorded in his notes.
How it must have hurt the young dreamer to be told that he was not man enough for the fight. The would-be activist who, as a schoolboy in Sarajevo, had found his escape through books grew ever more brooding and withdrawn. ‘Many who have spoken with him think he is a child,’ wrote Dr Pappenheim, ‘think that he was inspired by others, only because he cannot express himself sufficiently, is not generally gifted as a talker. Always a reader and always alone, not often engaging in debates.’
Princip spent much of the next two years milling around Belgrade living on the breadline, sleeping in dosshouses frequented by other young Bosnians who had migrated to Serbia, all of whom were resentful about the continuing occupation of their homeland. They would gather around Green Wreath Square, an open area of the city on the hillside leading up to the fortress, easy walking distance from the railway station, which was laid out along the bank of the Sava. The square took its name from the Green Wreath Hotel, but all around were other hostels, coffee houses and soup kitchens, modest establishments with similarly lyrical names, such as the Golden Sturgeon, the Acorn Wreath, Café America and the Theatre Café. The Sarajevo trial would hear from one witness who described the area as the sort of place where ‘only lower-class people used to go’. Here a cheap meal could be had and ideas exchanged on how to earn money to pay for the next one. A few hundred yards below lay Belgrade’s main harbour for the large barges plying the Sava and Danube, a place where piecemeal work as a stevedore was sometimes on offer. When times were particularly hard, young Bosnians such as Princip would present themselves at Belgrade’s larger churches and monastic communities to beg for alms. Dedijer wrote that many of these young Bosnians were in effect vagrants willing to spend the night sleeping in a kennel.
The area was so thick with south-Slav immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire that one of the main thoroughfares just down from the square was named Bosnia Street. Its flophouses were places where crowds would gather to hear Bosnian folk songs being performed and stanzas declaimed from epic poems learned in childhood back in the zadrugas of home. Most were Bosnian Serbs, but among them was a small number of Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims, driven to Belgrade by the ongoing occupation of their homeland. Young men who fought as guerrillas in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 were frequent customers, for the price of a drink being willing to tell tall war stories to an audience of young Bosnians keen to hear how the Ottoman occupier had been driven out. Over their tiny cups of ‘Bosnian coffee’ and plates of ćevapčići and burek, the young men would listen closely, brooding and plotting about how freedom might one day be won for Bosnia. At a time when the Serbian government was still led by those who opposed confrontation with Austria–Hungary, the young men dreaming of liberating their homeland had to be ever on the lookout for spies. Care had to be taken not just against informers in the pay of Austria–Hungary, but also against others loyal to these moderate elements from within Serbia itself.
Throughout his time in Belgrade Princip was constantly on the move, staying at a number of modest addresses around Bosnia Street, where he was forced to share rooms with others as he worked on his studies. In spite of his failure at the Fifth Grade examination in June 1912 he still had ambitions to complete his secondary education. Surviving on modest stipends sent every so often by his brother Jovo, he would head back overland to Bosnia towards the end of each year when the money ran out and spent the winters of 1912 and 1913 back with his parents in Obljaj or at his brother’s home in Hadžići, driving Jovo’s wife mad because of the time he spent with his books rather than helping around the house.
By the summer of 1913 Princip was back in Belgrade and in a matter of a few months managed to pass the examinations for three school grades, the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh. At the Belgrade Historical Archives I found his school reports for this period and saw that his academic performance was now back to the high levels of his early schooling in Sarajevo, graded Very Good in several subjects. Interestingly, the ‘weak boy’ was ranked as Excellent at gymnastics. Handwritten notes on the report sheets indicated he passed special grade exams authorised by the Serbian Minister of Education, a procedure that appears to have been a standard requirement for foreign students from the neighbouring country of Bosnia. At his trial Austro-Hungarian prosecutors mocked the education system of Serbia, where three school years could be tested in such a short period of time. ‘It would never happen in a serious education system such as ours,’ they sneered. After another winter with his books back in Bosnia, Princip returned to Belgrade in March 1914 with plans to take the final secondary-school exams, the Eighth Grade, in the late summer of that year.
He would never take the exam. An opportunity arose in the early summer of 1914 for the young man, now nineteen years of age, to prove wrong those who had judged him too frail to make a freedom fighter. ‘Wherever I went,’ he later told Austro-Hungarian police investigators, ‘people took me for a weakling, indeed, for a man who would be completely ruined by immoderate study of literature. And I pretended that I was a weak person, even though I was not.’
Of the original Green Wreath Square, little was left when I set about exploring the city. The initial artillery barrages of the First World War were launched against Belgrade by Austro-Hungarian forces from positions dug in just across the river at the end of July 1914, and many of the square’s buildings were damaged. It was eventually redeveloped as a bus station, one that today retains a tatty, rundown air, a hangout for vagrants, drug addicts and prostitutes, the flophouses replaced by tattoo parlours, fast-food outlets and slot-machine arcades. I found its underpasses being used by twenty-first-century descendants of those Bosnian wanderers: Roma Gypsies scraping a living by selling cheap clothes, phone-chargers and other tat from unlicensed stalls. When I approached the bus terminal for the first time I found all the subway hall lined with Roma hawkers, their wares laid out on flattened cardboard boxes spread across the tiled floor. As I walked in, a shout went up and, as one, the traders scooped up their sandwich-board shops and made a run for it. Two policemen walked in just behind me and arrested one of the Roma who was too slow off the mark.
Just down the slope stood one of the few nineteenth-century buildings to survive the redevelopment, the original Golden Sturgeon café where Princip often went to eat. Today it is the Luo Wang Fa discount shop, where cold-eyed Chinese shop assistants follow customers down the aisles to make sure they do not shoplift the cheap crockery, household goods and other items on the shelves. The plaster on the building’s façade is dark and patchy with disrepair, but the original outline of the building remains intact, the windows still there on the roofline, opening into attic rooms where Bosnian vagrants would have been packed a century ago. I asked the shopkeepers inside if any of them had heard of Princip, but they shook their heads, looking over my shoulder to make sure my questions were not a ploy to distract them while they were being robbed.
On the graffiti-covered wall outside I found a plaque dating from the building’s heyday as a busy café. It recorded that crowds gathered here in 1906 for the official founding of the Jedinstvo workers’ singing society. I wondered if their performances had ever been listened to by Princip, the student who had read so keenly about socialist workers’ rights. A few doors down stood a shop selling erotic lingerie. Walking up the slope from the busy four-lane highway that feeds the bus station took me to a much more upmarket part of Belgrade, the pedestrian street of Knez Mihailova, which is lined by elegant nineteenth-century buildings with façades that have not been allowed to fall into disrepair, a long run of expensive boutiques, restaurants and cafés crowded with people. It follows the ridgeline of the promontory, a thread connecting the old Turkish fortress of Belgrade with the modern city that came into existence through Serbia’s rush for a new identity after winning independence.
The fortress that for so many centuries was such a strategic asset, commanding the flat plain that stretches north towards modern-day Hungary, sits today within the leafy confines of Kalemegdan Park, a large recreational space of lawns and tree-covered gravel walkways. Youngsters play tennis on courts chalked out below the old fortress walls, and the former barracks today house the National Military Museum, a file of redundant artillery pieces on permanent display outside, an eclectic collection born of Serbia’s long martial history of clashes with the Ottomans, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans and, most recently, NATO. The battlements that used to have such key military value are crawled over by children licking ice-creams and tourists taking photos of the spot where the Sava and Danube Rivers merge serenely down below. On Friday nights in the summer the battlements throng with youngsters dancing to music arranged by Serbia’s hippest DJs. With independence, a surge of Serbian national pride sought to erase all traces of foreign rule in what had for so long been an Ottoman settlement. Scores of mosques were deliberately demolished, yet within the precincts of the old castle I saw a relic from an era that lasted four centuries – an ancient Turkish turbe or shrine, identical to others that I came across in Sarajevo.
Princip would often visit Kalemegdan with his compatriots, walking its tree-shaded footpaths and brooding over what might be done to strike back against the Austro-Hungarian occupiers of their homeland. But as I went in search of his trail, the park I wanted to find was elsewhere: a small triangle of grass lined with trees just a block down from Knez Mihailova. Only one photograph of Princip survives from his time in Belgrade, one taken on a bench in what is today a park named after Vojvoda Vuk, the title won by a Serbian freedom fighter, Vojin Popović, who died in the First World War. A hundred years ago it would have been a quiet place for three young Bosnian immigrants to pose for a photograph. It was taken just a few years after the family souvenir snapped in Sarajevo, but the Princip framed by the camera this time is a very different person. He sits on a bench, his face now lean, malnourished even, his top lip shaded by what appears to be a rather unconvincing moustache. A hat is cocked on the back of his head and his legs are crossed, the trousers grubby in a suit that seems a size or two too big for him. The clean shoes of the souvenir photograph have been replaced by footwear that is dusty and unpolished.