Who was assassinated during a visit to Sarajevo in Bosnia
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie Chotek, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated in Sarajevo on Sunday 28 June 1914. The shooter was Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb. Six weeks later Europe was at war. A short overview of the corner, the bridge, and the museum where the event is now marked.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie Chotek, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated in Sarajevo at approximately 10:55 a.m. on Sunday 28 June 1914. The shooter was Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb and member of the underground nationalist group Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia). Princip fired two shots from a Belgian FN Model 1910 pistol at a stationary open touring car, from three metres’ range, on the corner of what is now Zelenih Beretki and Obala Kulina bana, twenty metres north of the Latin Bridge. Both victims died within the hour.
Six weeks later, on 28 July 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within a week the alliance system had pulled in Germany, Russia, France, Britain, and eventually the Ottoman Empire and the United States (Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 2012). Approximately twenty million people died in the First World War that followed. Almost every historian who has written on the origins of that war treats the 28 June 1914 shooting at the Latin Bridge as its trigger.
The corner is still there. What follows is a short overview — who was killed, who killed them, where it happened, and how the site is marked today — with links out to the depth coverage on this site.
Who was assassinated
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was fifty years old, the nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph I, and heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne. He was in Sarajevo to observe Habsburg army manoeuvres in the mountains west of the city and to attend the formal municipal reception at the Vijećnica.
Sophie Chotek was forty-six, a Czech noblewoman whose marriage to Franz Ferdinand had been controversial in Vienna because she was not of royal blood. Court protocol usually denied her the ceremonial honours of a Habsburg consort. The Sarajevo trip was one of the few state occasions on which she could appear beside her husband with full public standing. 28 June 1914 was their fourteenth wedding anniversary (Donia, Sarajevo: A Biography, 2006).
Sophie was hit first, in the abdomen. She died in the car within about fifteen minutes. Franz Ferdinand was hit in the neck; he died within about thirty, at the Governor’s Residence at Konak.
Who was the assassin
Gavrilo Princip was born in 1894 in the village of Obljaj, in the western Bosnian region of Krajina, into a Bosnian Serb peasant family. In the summer of 1914 he was finishing secondary school at Sarajevo’s First Gymnasium. He had spent the previous year in Belgrade, where he had made contact with the network that supplied Црна рука (Crna Ruka, the Black Hand), a nationalist paramilitary group linked to Serbian military intelligence (Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo, 1966).
The Habsburg administration had governed Bosnia since 1878 — the Kállay era that built the city the archduke was visiting. Princip was one of seven Mlada Bosna conspirators positioned along the Archduke’s published route that morning. The others were Nedeljko Čabrinović, Muhamed Mehmedbašić, Vaso Čubrilović, Cvjetko Popović, Trifko Grabež, and Danilo Ilić. Six were Serb; Mehmedbašić was Bosniak. Their ages ranged from seventeen to twenty-seven. Princip at nineteen was too young, in strict Austro-Hungarian law, to receive the death penalty. He was sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour and died of tuberculosis at Theresienstadt prison on 28 April 1918, aged twenty-three.
Where the assassination happened
The site is a corner of pavement on the north bank of the Miljacka in central Sarajevo, roughly a five-minute walk east from the Sebilj fountain in Baščaršija. In 1914 the ground-floor shop on that corner was Moritz Schiller’s Delicatessen, a Habsburg-era food store. The street was then called Franz Josef Street; today it is Zelenih Beretki. Twenty metres south is the Latin Bridge — a four-arch Ottoman stone bridge rebuilt in 1798–1799 on sixteenth-century foundations.
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The bridge was renamed Princip Bridge (Principov most) during the Yugoslav period, as part of a state-level rehabilitation of Princip as a national-liberation hero. In 1992 the Sarajevo City Council reverted the name to Latin Bridge — the older Ottoman name — removing the Yugoslav political marker.
The driver’s wrong turn
Franz Ferdinand should not have been at that corner. An earlier attempt on his life at approximately 10:10 a.m., a grenade thrown by Čabrinović at the Ćumurija bridge, had bounced off the folded roof of the archducal car and detonated under the following vehicle, wounding a dozen bystanders but killing no one. After the reception at the Vijećnica — the striped Orientalizing city hall that later held the National Library — Franz Ferdinand insisted on visiting the wounded at the Sarajevo Garrison Hospital before continuing to Konak. His route was adjusted.
The lead car in the motorcade turned north into Franz Josef Street as planned. Franz Ferdinand’s driver, Leopold Lojka, followed. Governor Oskar Potiorek, seated behind Franz Ferdinand, then realised the archduke had changed his plans again and gave the order to reverse back onto the Appel Quay and continue west to the hospital. Lojka stopped the car directly in front of Schiller’s Delicatessen.
Princip had already given up. His own attempt earlier that morning at another point along the route had failed to materialise — the motorcade had passed too quickly and at the wrong angle. Per his October 1914 court testimony, he had walked to Schiller’s for a sandwich. The car came to him. He stepped from the corner, drew the pistol, and fired at three metres’ range.
Historians have argued for a century about how much of the twentieth century turned on that one navigational error (Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 2012).
What you can see at the site today
The corner where Princip stood is now the Latin Bridge branch of the Museum of Sarajevo 1878–1918, opened on the 39th anniversary of the assassination — 28 June 1953 — in the same ground-floor space that had been Schiller’s Delicatessen.
A small brass plaque on the outside wall reads, in Bosnian and English: “From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie.” The plaque’s wording has been rewritten four times in a century — from the 1914 Habsburg version (which named Princip as a criminal), to a 1930s Yugoslav-royal plaque, to a 1953 Yugoslav-socialist plaque (which framed him as a hero of national liberation), to the current post-1992 plaque, which is deliberately neutral.
Inside, the museum’s two ground-floor rooms hold a replica of Princip’s FN Model 1910 pistol (the original is at Vienna’s Heeresgeschichtliches Museum), photographs of the conspirators and the aftermath, Sarajevo newspaper front pages from 29 June 1914 in three languages, and the court records from Princip’s October 1914 trial. Captions are bilingual. The voice of the exhibition is documentary rather than commemorative.
For fuller context, this site has a longer piece — The corner where the twentieth century started, 28 June 1914 — which walks through the morning in detail, block by block, and is worth reading before or after the visit.
Why one shooting started a world war
The short answer: it did not, on its own. The alliance system of 1914 was already loaded. The July Crisis that followed the assassination — the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia, the Russian mobilisation, the German Schlieffen Plan for a two-front war, the British commitment to Belgian neutrality — worked through a set of interlocking treaties that had been assembled over the previous two decades (Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 2012). The shooting at the Latin Bridge was the pretext that let each capital do what it had already prepared to do.
But it was the pretext. Without Franz Ferdinand’s death on Vidovdan 1914, the specific cascade of the following six weeks does not run in the specific way it did. That is what makes the corner one of the strangest visitor sites in Europe: an ordinary pavement, a small brass plaque, a quiet museum — marking the event that generally gets credit for triggering the deadliest war in human history to that point. Eighty years later, a different war would leave its own marks in the same pavement — the Sarajevo Roses, red-resin fills where mortar shells landed.
Visiting the corner
The Latin Bridge is a five-minute walk from the Sebilj in Baščaršija — it is stop 8 on the site’s self-guided walking tour. Cross the bridge or stand on the pavement at the north end; the corner is the building with the museum sign. The museum is small, entry is around 3 KM, and half an hour is enough. From there it is a two-minute walk east to Inat Kuća and the Vijećnica, where the archducal reception was held that morning, or west along Ferhadija toward the Sacred Heart Cathedral.
The plaque does not tell you what to feel. The museum presents the evidence and leaves the interpretation to you. Locals cross the bridge every day. Children still kick footballs against the parapet. The river goes on.
Sources
- Robert J. Donia, Sarajevo: A Biography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). The English-language standard on Sarajevo’s twentieth-century history; substantial treatment of June 1914.
- Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2012). The recent revisionist account of the 1914 crisis and the diplomatic cascade.
- Vladimir Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966). The classical treatment of the assassination itself; still the fullest documentary record.
- Sarajevo City Museum, permanent exhibition at the Latin Bridge branch.
- Court records of the 1914 Sarajevo assassination trial, held at the Sarajevo Historical Archive.
Sources & further reading
- Robert J. Donia, 'Sarajevo: A Biography' (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006)
- Christopher Clark, 'The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914' (London: Allen Lane, 2012)
- Vladimir Dedijer, 'The Road to Sarajevo' (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966)
- Sarajevo City Museum (Muzej Sarajeva), permanent exhibition at the Latin Bridge branch
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