We sat with an elderly man called Ljupko Kuna, who told us of bear-hunting in nearby mountains. Aged eighty-four, he walked with a cane, his joints worn thin by decades of service as a hunting guide, and his vision had faded a little so he wore spectacles. But with blade-sharp recall he told us about his most famous bear-hunting client: Tito.
‘I only shot with Tito for the last fifteen years of his life in the 1960s and 1970s, but for his age he was a good shot,’ Ljupko said, pouring two sachets of sugar into his coffee. ‘He was very precise as well, never shooting young animals and only going for them when they were trophy age, from twelve to fifteen years old. He never needed more than one shot for a kill. And that is not easy sometimes when the bear is in the wrong position or perhaps hidden by a branch.’ Ljupko said Tito was so keen that he hunted every year, entertaining official guests, and although Ljupko remembered various heads of state fondly, he did not have a good word to say about the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. ‘That man shot at anything that moved,’ Ljupko said. ‘He was incapable of following any protocols when they stayed at the hunting lodge in Stinging Nettle Valley. It was built by the Austro-Hungarians.’
I had seen photographs of Tito hunting and was struck by how Austrian he looked. In one he stands over a slain bear, his hand holding the barrel of his rifle with its butt on the ground. His jacket is Tyrolean green, and the band around his brown felt hat is adorned with a feather, in the vogue of the European hunter. The photograph was almost identical to others I had seen of another keen hunter connected with this area, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. As the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he had rich opportunities to shoot at imperial hunting lodges, castles and estates spread across much of east and central Europe. The man who would be shot dead by Princip in Sarajevo logged every game animal, bird and trophy animal he shot during his lifetime, and had the numbers displayed on an ornate score chart that I had seen in Austria. The grand total came to 274,889.
‘Tito really felt at home in these mountains,’ Ljupko said. ‘He fought around here during the Second World War at a time when he and the partisans were being hunted by the Germans. They always managed to escape, so he felt a special bond to this part of the country.’ Ljupko was not the first to recognise Tito’s close link to these hills. Fitzroy Maclean described in his war memoir how Tito appeared most at ease when living as a fugitive, dodging German patrols, in caves spread across Bosnia’s mountains.
We emerged from the embrace of these same mountains on the last day of our walk to Bugojno, the gravel track firming into a suburban tarmac road, easing between comfortable family homes with jungle gyms in the gardens and modest cars parked out front. Then it grew yet further and connected to the main highway running into town from the south, and for the first time since Obljaj we had a proper pavement to walk along. I had covered the fall of the town to Bosnian Muslim forces in the summer of 1993 and for the first time on the hike I had reached a place I recognised – terra that for me was cognita.
There was no doubting which Bosnian community was in power. Just as new Catholic churches were the hallmark of today’s Bosnian Croat authority over Glamoč and Kupres, so religious buildings in Bugojno told a story. In the town centre I walked by the seventeenth-century Sultan Ahmed Han II mosque, a building I had last seen as a wreck. My 1993 diary recorded that it had been struck by scores of artillery shells, and I had taken photographs of the gaping hole in the roof. All that was left of the minaret back then was a fibrous stump, the top section blown clean away by shelling from Bosnian Croat positions. Today the mosque is pristine, the main building restored to its pre-war condition, while the minaret has not just been rebuilt, but pumped up as if with steroids. The new column was roughly twice as tall as the original it replaced.
I found the supersized minaret unsightly. The traditional mosques of Bosnia, with their pincushion-domed roofs and needle-thin minarets, add so much to the landscape – a parcel of Europe where Muslims have worshipped for centuries. Rebecca West described them rapturously as ‘among the most pleasing architectural gestures ever made by urbanity’. The new versions felt excessive, unworthy of the fine bridges and buildings left in Bosnia by 400 years of Ottoman occupation.
After roughly a hundred miles of walking from Obljaj, Arnie and I searched out the old railway station where Princip and his father set off by train for Sarajevo in the summer of 1907. The Baedeker guide recorded the station here as the tip of a branch line on the outer fringe of the rail network built by the Austro-Hungarians. Primarily designed to haul timber felled in the region’s thick forests, the line also ran occasional passenger trains. According to the old timetable recorded by Baedeker, the train used to take about five hours to reach Sarajevo from here, with several fiddly connections to get on and off the special locomotives needed to climb a particularly high mountain pass.
Arnie and I were too late to catch a train – about forty years too late. The last one left Bugojno in the 1970s when the line became so uneconomic that it was scrapped. The tracks had long gone, but we found the original station building, doubling now as the main offices for a bus terminus built where the trains used to run. The old station’s paintwork was tatty, but at least someone bothered to tend the pot plants in their window boxes. With its tiled roof and three-storey symmetrical design, there was no mistaking its European origins. It would have looked perfectly at home next to a platform in the Tyrol.
Those early Austro-Hungarian railway surveyors had clearly known their business, for the road that today delivers you towards Sarajevo uses the exact same route as the original railway: down the valley of the Vrbas River, over the Komar pass into the Lašva River valley, finally joining the course of the Bosna River all the way to the capital. The slope at Komar was so steep that the train needed a special rack-and-pinion design to claw its way up the hillside. Ljupko, the bear-hunter from Kupres, had used the railway as a young man and told us that when it began to climb the pass most of the passengers would get off and walk, easily keeping up with the creaking locomotive.
Taking the bus would see us following the same route used by Princip, so I bought two tickets towards Sarajevo and sat down next to Arnie on a bench, happy at the thought that for the next part of the trip I would not have to lug my heavy pack. The summer sun was punishing and I was grateful for the shade from the bus-station canopy. When Fitzroy Maclean arrived here on a wartime locomotive ‘belching flames, smoke and sparks’, he described conditions that could not have been more different. ‘Under a cold, penetrating drizzle Bugojno station was bleak and cheerless,’ he wrote. As I contemplated the way history in Bosnia so often runs over the same ground, another small coincidence was offered up by the arrival of our bus. On its grille the maker’s name was spelled out in silver letters: Gräf & Stift. It was the same company that built the limousine in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was being driven when he was shot by Princip.
CHAPTER 6
Rocking Bosnia
Rock band Franz Ferdinand performing in Bosnia
The author staying with Drago and Marija Taraba, Christmas 1993
The author visiting the couple nineteen years later
With the bus heading along the Vrbas valley, I sat back in my seat to rest, the window a screen on which a blissful summer scene scrolled past: river pools shaded by willows, recently mown pastures coned by hayricks, tanned children playing carefree in the dust. As Arnie gabbled away about never having had a hike to match the one we had just shared, I felt quietly relieved that we had made it safely on foot through some of Bosnia’s more mine-contaminated backwoods. The walk had given me a sense of how far Gavrilo Princip had come when the ‘weak boy’ left home for the first time, not in terms of mileage, but more in terms of breaking with the only life he had ever known. He had left behind the closed rural society of Serbian serfdom and would encounter for the first time other Bosnians – Muslims and Croats – with their identifiers: religious buildings, clothes, food, traditions. It must have been bewildering for hi
m as a thirteen-year-old to shift horizons so radically, to break away from the confines of a social system static for so long – one that had, in common with much of Europe, for centuries been framed by the strictures of hierarchy, feudalism and empire. To find out how Princip responded I would need to head on to Sarajevo, where he went to school.
Sadly I would have to do that without Arnie whose time away from his newspaper job in London was soon up. ‘I am so sorry I cannot finish what we started,’ he said. ‘I have so many great memories to take from this trip. For a start, I had no idea this country was so stunning, so varied, so naturally rich, so incredibly beautiful and so bloody big. At times that walk could have killed me. But the best thing was the way the people we met could not have been more open, more friendly: the Princip family, the hotelier in Glamoč, the fishing mullahs. None of them gave a damn about my ethnicity. And yet we saw with our own eyes what the war has left behind: the oversized churches, the huge minarets, the land cut up by minefields, those ugly, ugly houses still burnt and not repaired.’
All societies have fault lines – rivalries, jealousies, suspicions – driven by the commonest of human frailties: self-pity and self-interest. The challenge is subsuming these fault lines and working towards a greater, collective good, one that draws a community of strangers to a shared project. To do that takes trust in a concept that is as modern as it is radical: the nation. So prevalent today is the idea of nation that one forgets how new it is. Much longer-established was order driven by obedience to a local superpower, whether it called itself baron or beg, king or emperor. The passage from coercion to cooperation, of people coming together because they choose to and not because they are forced to, is one of the greatest of human journeys. My encounters in Bosnia brought home how different countries are in different places on that journey.
A newspaper left on the bus carried an advert with a totally unexpected Princip link that caught my eye: Franz Ferdinand, a British band named after Princip’s famous victim, was to perform in the north-Bosnian town of Banja Luka. To thank Arnie for all his efforts I suggested a short detour, a trip north so that I could treat him to some live music. A man who taught himself English from British music was not going to miss this chance, so instead of heading directly for Sarajevo we changed buses. First stop was the town of Jajce – somewhere I had always wanted to visit if only because, after being dropped by parachute, Fitzroy Maclean had met Tito there for the first time. With its relic of a medieval fort high on a hilltop overlooking the cascading confluence of two rivers, Jajce also had the reputation of being one of Bosnia’s most beautiful towns. Rebecca West wrote that the town’s name meant ‘testicle’, reflecting the round shape of the hill. During the war Jajce had been unreachable, so I had to make do with descriptions of its charms from other sources, such as this from Baedeker. ‘A pavilion above the waterfall affords the best view; wraps are necessary.’
When the bus delivered us to Jajce, the town did not disappoint. Elegant houses spilled down a slope capped by the old fortress that had briefly housed Tito’s guerrilla headquarters. The hill led all the way to an old town wall that skirted the left bank of a river called the Pliva. I could see skittish trout and knots of weed being worked by the current where the Pliva spread evenly across a shallow, ornamental pool leading to a weir. There a dramatic transformation took place. Once over the weir, the water tumbled seventy noisy, churning, globular feet straight down into the Vrbas below. In the summer heat I could not resist, stripping to my shorts and jumping into the upper pool, fish star-bursting away as I thrashed through the water towards the weir and dared myself to peek over the lip. It took just seconds to dry in the July sun, and Arnie then led me to the shade of an old hall on the river bank that he remembered well from his childhood. ‘We were brought here all the time as a sort of school pilgrimage,’ he reminisced. ‘Back then it was an important national monument because it was in here in 1943 that the conference that founded communist Yugoslavia was held.’
Inside we found an elderly curator, dressed down in a replica shirt of the Dutch football team Ajax, who seemed delighted to have some visitors. He turned on the lights in the hall and shouted the old partisan wartime rallying cry: smrt fašizmu, ‘death to fascism’. I was pleasantly surprised to find the museum so well looked after with its collection of Titoist memorabilia and propaganda. In the communist era, when Arnie was marched through here as a dutiful schoolboy in the 1980s, the museum had been a place of almost religious devotion. Tito’s star then still dominated the national Yugoslav firmament. Events of the 1990s had totally changed that, however, as militant nationalism let each of Bosnia’s rival groups dwell on how ill-used by communism they believed they had been. The atmosphere in the museum when we visited was no longer spiritual. It was more nostalgic, even comic, like a teenager picking up a pair of granny’s bloomers and wondering how anyone ever wore such things.
From Jajce a two-hour drive along a mountain gorge cut by the Vrbas delivered Arnie and me to Banja Luka where, sometime after midnight, we found ourselves within the grounds of the town’s old Ottoman fortress, struggling against a scrummage of young Bosnian Serbs and the abnormally high summer night’s temperature. For a moment all was darkness inside the compound. There was just enough light from the night sky to make out the high curtain walls and the hulk of a watchtower, which had the same type of steeply pitched shingle roof as the old hovels back in Obljaj. Then, with a blast of sound to wake the dead, a shock of light came up on a stage, and all I could see was a thirty-foot-high picture of Princip. For its first-ever gig in Bosnia the band Franz Ferdinand was not going to miss the opportunity to flag up the local boy who gave their name such impetus.
As the crowd surged towards the four musicians, I stared at the massive backdrop of Princip’s face. It would be the only time on my entire trip through the Balkans that I would come across his likeness displayed so publicly. I recognised it immediately as the portrait taken while he was in Austro-Hungarian custody following the assassination, the fire of his revolutionary zeal doused by months of solitary confinement. His eyes are flat, moustache meagre, hair mangy. When Princip scratched his initials on that rock in the garden back in Obljaj and boasted to his friend ‘one day people will know my name’, could he ever have dreamed that the time would come when thousands of fellow countrymen would rock a summer’s night away in front of a stage decorated with his portrait.
‘The name came to me while I was watching horseracing on television,’ Alex Kapranos, the band’s lead singer, had confided earlier, after I managed to get past the security guards at the venue. They had thought I was a journalist and kept muttering ‘no media, no media’, but when I got a message through to the band that I was a British author researching Princip, the security cordon was lifted. ‘Talking history with you makes a change from talking about sex and drugs all the time,’ Alex said, shaking my hand.
‘We had been playing together for some time and, to be honest, we didn’t really have a name. It didn’t feel important back then.’ As Alex spoke he looked around for backing from the other band members, old friends mainly from college in Glasgow. Bob Hardy, the bassist, took up the story. ‘It was when a poster was being designed for a concert and the designer said, “You guys really need a name or the poster just won’t work”,’ he said.
‘We wanted a name that people could make a connection with, that people could remember, maybe because it had a significance or an alliteration or certain phonetic characteristics,’ Alex continued. ‘Duran Duran is a name that somehow sticks in your head. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly why but that’s what we were looking for.
‘So I was watching TV one afternoon, like a good student wasting my time with daytime television. And all of a sudden there was a horse running in a race and it was called The Archduke. It made me think of a name we all knew from school, and that’s how we got to Franz Ferdinand. To be honest, I have no idea if the horse won.’
Later during the performance, at on
e of the breaks between songs, Alex half-turned and swung his arm extravagantly as if to introduce Princip to the crowd, shouting into the microphone, ‘And this next one is for old friends.’ A cheer rose, but it was not a roar of recognition. It was more a rush of enthusiasm from the audience. Shouting to make myself heard, I asked all those standing near me in the crowd, but they had no idea who the man in the picture was.
Later as I struggled to sleep, my ears buzzing after the concert, my mind dwelt on why young Bosnian Serbs in Banja Luka did not know Princip. He is, without question, the Bosnian Serb with the greatest historical impact of all time and yet it was clear, from what I had heard, that a hundred years after the assassination he was not cherished, and was scarcely recognised, among his own people.
The issue of Bosnian Serb identity was horribly corrupted in the war years of 1992–5, no more so than in Banja Luka, the dark centre of it all. A once-mixed city was culturally flattened, made ethnically one-dimensional as extremist thugs from the Bosnian Serb community seized control and made it the de facto capital of territory under their control. Mosques were blown up and Catholic congregations attacked. It was a few miles north of Banja Luka that experimentation in extreme ethnic cleansing took place, when Bosnian Serb bullies probed the lassitude of the international community’s diplomatic response, working out that in the late twentieth century they could still get away with murder on an institutional scale. Just up the road from the concert venue they established death-camps where Bosnian Serb forces bullied, killed, tortured, starved and raped Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats.