When our turn eventually came, I remember being so wired with adrenalin that I was in a transcendental state. It was pitch-black, a moonless, cloudy night, but my senses were so alive that I managed to coach the vehicle through the darkness up what would become known as ‘The Most Dangerous Road in Europe’. This disturbing soubriquet was bestowed by Richard Holbrooke, the lead American diplomat responsible for eventually bringing an end to the war in Bosnia. During his negotiations he got to know all about the dangers of the Mount Igman road. Some months after I drove it, Mr Holbrooke was in a convoy on the track when a vehicle carrying three of his close colleagues got too close to the edge. The hillside gave way and the vehicle tumbled down the forested slope, killing all three Americans.
As I drove that Land Rover up the trail, my two journalist friends responded in very different ways as we sat crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the driving compartment. The man, an American, was utterly silent, while my British colleague talked non-stop. It made no difference. I did not care. I was too alive, too fixed on staying so. Night on Mount Igman was ‘hideous’ for Princip, but for me it was something quite different, a life-affirming thrill.
After crossing the mountain into safe territory we drove through the small hours to reach a hotel down on the Croatian coast, where I fell into a delicious sleep. When I woke I turned on the television to witness an event of great significance to the country I now call home: South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It was a moment made magical by Nelson Mandela’s grand gesture of forgiveness. Rugby had long been associated with South Africa’s white community, the dominant minority that had so cruelly exploited the black majority, yet there was Mandela willing on the Springboks, even wearing a Springbok shirt. It was a rare but inspiring example of past hatreds being buried, people looking to tomorrow and letting go of yesterday, breaking the cycle of victimhood and vengeance.
The memory of that life-affirming drive kept me going as I explored the mountain on foot seventeen years later. As if guided by a vapour trail of 1995 adrenalin, I made the correct turnings in the forest and chose the right way from a maze of footpaths and trails that star-burst across the hilly plateau. Every so often I was passed by a carload of holidaymakers exploring the mountain and the old sporting facilities dating from the Sarajevo 1984 Winter Olympics, when Mount Igman hosted several of the main events. At one point mountain-bikers whooshed past me. I came to an old mountain lodge, where the housekeeper made me tea brewed with leaves picked from mountain bushes. He kept a loaded rifle near the door, but it was for bears, not combat. This is how a mountain should be used, I thought, for recreation, not as a desperate battleground for control of Europe’s most perilous road. At one point a car of Bosnians stopped and the driver asked me the way to Hadžići. After two weeks’ hiking, improving my Bosnian language skills and getting to know the layout of the country at peace, I was rather proud to be able to direct him.
The track I was on finally began its descent, eventually making a sharp hairpin that I remembered well. I was near the bottom of the trail, once the most dangerous part of the most dangerous road. It was near here that the three diplomats fell to their deaths and the British soldier was killed by Bosnian Serbs. All of a sudden the trees parted and a view opened up in front of me. There in the near distance was the airport, and beyond that rose the bar-graph of skyscrapers from the city’s modern suburbs. I had reached Sarajevo.
CHAPTER 7
The Fall of Gabriel
First school report for Princip at the Merchants’ School in Sarajevo, student Number 32, his first name given as Gavro
Tourist postcards of central Sarajevo, circa 1910
From the foot of the mountain I took a tram into the centre of Sarajevo, a twenty-minute journey that reminded me of perhaps the most surprising feature of a city that has had such an impact on global history: it is tiny. Passing strata of architecture gave clues as to the development of Sarajevo through the ages. First, there were buildings constructed since the war of the 1990s: brightly lit shopping centres set amid dense residential areas, some large, modernist mosques and one particularly striking new landmark, a twisted tower of mirrored glass that dominates the skyline of the city not far from the site of the old railway station, where Gavrilo Princip would have arrived. Then there were the massed ranks of buildings I recognised from the war: bland apartment buildings constructed during the communist era, still with a smattering of tinny, locally made Yugo cars parked outside. As the valley narrowed, we came to the first structures that would have been familiar to Princip: neo-colonial constructions from the Austro-Hungarian period of occupation, solid European-looking office blocks adorned with carved stuccowork on their façades and hefty wooden doorways. And finally I saw buildings dating back hundreds of years from the Ottoman occupation: bridges, minarets and storerooms roofed with turtle-shell domes.
Sarajevo was founded where a narrow gorge cut by a small mountain river called the Miljacka blooms into a full valley protected by steeply sided slopes. The oldest part – dwellings, mosques, hammams, shops and hostels ensnared by a web of alleyways – grew where the valley was still at its tightest, easiest to control from fortresses built on high bluffs that to this day still define the city’s easternmost limits. As the centuries have passed Sarajevo has crept both down the river and up the hillsides to create a city bowl snug within the contours of its highland setting.
When the Ottoman Empire swallowed Bosnia in the late fifteenth century this defensible valley was the strategic site chosen by its commanders for their new capital. It led to a golden age of construction in the first half of the sixteenth century, when some of Europe’s most elegant mosques were built and the Miljacka was laced with fine stone bridges. ‘The Bosnian countryman gapes with as much wonderment at the domes of the two chief mosques as an English rustic at the first sight of St Paul’s,’ wrote Arthur Evans when he trekked here in 1875 at the end of Ottoman rule. Established as a hub on trade routes across the Balkan Peninsula, Sarajevo grew quickly through commerce, with one seventeenth-century visitor reporting that the population had already reached 80,000, making it a true metropolis for that era, one of the largest cities in the Balkans. It was a city then dominated by Islam, the faith both of the Ottoman colonial outsiders deployed to Bosnia and of the growing cohort of local Slavs who converted to the religion of the occupier. Evans echoed others when he noted that Sarajevo’s ethnic heritage was writ in ‘a skyline of a hundred minarets’.
As the city’s commercial power grew, so Sarajevo drew many from beyond the Islamic world, earning a name for inter-ethnic tolerance. Local Catholics (forerunners of today’s Bosnian Croats) and Orthodox Christians (the original Bosnian Serbs) established sizeable minorities in a city that became so mixed it was known as the ‘Damascus of the North’. One of the oldest Ottoman structures spanning the Miljacka was named the Latin Bridge, because it linked the small Catholic district where the Latin liturgy was observed on the south bank of the river to the main body of the city over on the north. There was also a significant community of Sephardic Jews, who made their home here after being expelled from Spain in the late fifteenth century. The city’s original Jewish cemetery was one of the most fought-over pieces of land during the war of the 1990s, with trenches that burrowed between bulky, trunk-shaped gravestones used by local Jewry for hundreds of years. I once listened as soldiers from the two sides shouted abuse at each other, separated in places by only a few feet of no-man’s-land.
The racial egalitarianism seen in Sarajevo was typical of Ottoman pragmatism, the most efficient way to develop an imperial outpost in land heavily populated by ‘non-believers’, although this period was not without friction. The Sultan’s regular feuds with his always reactionary and occasionally mutinous military elite, the Janissaries, sometimes spread from Istanbul to Sarajevo, just as it did to other cities in the empire. Furthermore, leaders of the Bosnian Muslim community in Sarajevo grew so wealthy and powerful that they came to clash with the Pasha, t
he Sultan’s representative sent from Istanbul. After winning exemption for Sarajevo from imperial taxes, the increasingly haughty Slav elite grew ever more dismissive of the authority of the Sublime Porte. Friction with the Pasha became so acute that he was effectively ousted, and for many years around 1800 he was not welcome in the city, being obliged to move his capital elsewhere in Bosnia. Tradition had it that the Pasha could visit Sarajevo safely for just one night, but beyond that his security could not be guaranteed. Such an arrangement was never going to last, and the Turkish commanders who eventually arrived to put the upstart Slav Muslims back in their place did so bloodily and ruthlessly. Wider Ottoman military ambitions also cost Sarajevo dear, with raids by the empire’s traditional enemies from Hungary and Austria that saw large parts of the city burned to the ground.
With the Ottoman Empire ailing through the nineteenth century – ‘the sick man of Europe’ – so Sarajevo declined, and by the time Austria–Hungary sent its troops to occupy Bosnia in 1878 the population had roughly halved from its peak. When Arthur Evans arrived on foot he described it as ‘dark, fanatical and backward’, noting that there was not a single bookshop in the entire city. His description of street sanitation was particularly base, recording that it was not safe to go out on the streets at night because by then they belonged to rough, lawless, malodorous gangs of cleaners, sweepers and human-waste collectors. A city map from 1908 shows that even though Sarajevo was 400 years old, it still only nosed about a mile or so westwards down the valley. Beyond lay open country, although here the map showed grand colonial plans for a large development zone marked as ‘New Sarajevo’. At the time of the map’s publication this huge plot remained empty except for the railway station and a vast military barracks, both newly built on orders from Vienna.
Within the city limits of Sarajevo proper, the Austro-Hungarian occupiers had sought to project order on the muddle left by the decaying Ottoman Empire. While the new authorities left alone the main bazaar quarter, they laid out an ambitious grid of government offices, courthouses, colleges, museums, theatres and other more Western buildings. In 1895 Sarajevo became the first city in central Europe with an electric tram system, technology so cutting-edge it would be replicated in the network eventually installed on the streets of the imperial capital, Vienna.
The Miljacka was not spared the attention of the Habsburg urban planners. A Sarajevo city map from 1880 shows the river meandering past gravel reaches and islets between uneven muddy banks lined by a higgledy-piggledy assortment of gardens and houses. The Austro-Hungarians moved to impose order on the Miljacka and after several years’ work it ran, as it does today, ramrod-straight through the city centre, apart from two faint kinks. A stepped series of weirs still keeps the water shallow and slow-moving, canalised between masonry-lined banks with buildings on the entire length of the northern side, separated from the river bank by a wide, busy boulevard named Appel Quay by the Austro-Hungarian colonial authorities.
On occasion the clash of styles could grate between classical Ottoman and expansionist Habsburg designs. Indeed, Rebecca West described witheringly the faux-Moorish town hall that went up next to the old bazaar soon after the Austro-Hungarians arrived in Sarajevo. ‘The minaret of the mosque beside it has the air of a cat that watches a dog making a fool of itself,’ she wrote. In 1914 the town hall would be the last building Archduke Franz Ferdinand would enter alive.
In spite of all this work, the city’s mostly Muslim population lived at the start of the twentieth century as they always had, in dwellings of medieval simplicity that lapped up the steep valley sides, with none of the modernist rigour enforced downtown. To reach them you climbed narrowing alleys of cobblestones that snaked ever upwards, speckling the city’s contoured surrounds with grey shingle roofs and the occasional splash of headstone-white from tumbledown Muslim graveyards. ‘The numerous minarets and the little houses standing in gardens give the town a very picturesque appearance,’ enthused the 1905 Baedeker. A less benign description of the city comes from John Gunther, an American author writing in the 1930s. He wrote of Sarajevo as a ‘mud-caked primitive village’.
Princip was a little jumpy when he arrived here as a thirteen-year-old after his long journey on foot and by train. The trip had already extended his cultural horizons through exposure to other ethnic groups beyond the dirt-poor community of Bosnian Serb serfs where he had grown up. Reaching the city must have accelerated that process dramatically. Although small on the scale of twentieth-century Europe, Sarajevo was large enough to have been giddy-making for a boy from the rural hinterland. Vladimir Dedijer, the freedom-fighting author who was flown out wounded from Glamoč in 1943, collated anecdotes in his book, The Road to Sarajevo, about Princip’s early life. According to one, the young boy refused outright to stay in one guesthouse because it was run by a Bosnian Muslim innkeeper wearing the traditional costume of his community. ‘I do not wish to sleep there. They are Turks,’ the boy cried as he fled.
Lodging was eventually found for the young boy in the house of a Bosnian Serb widow, Stoja Ilić, who took in tenants at her home on Oprkanj Street. It was a lane on the edge of the city’s old bazaar quarter – narrow, twisting and just a stroll from where tinsmiths, carpet sellers, jewellers, saddle makers, coffee grinders, spice merchants and a slew of other traders had been noisily and fragrantly going about their business for hundreds of years. It would have been a thrilling place to explore for any new arrival: getting to know shortcuts through the network of alleyways; friendly traders offering a cheap treat, and grumpy ones to be avoided; the best spots to fish down on the river. And it would also have allowed the boy from an isolated Bosnian Serb community to feel the ethnic weave both of the city and of the wider country it represented, as he wandered lanes where the familiar Bosnian smell of meaty ćevapčići nuggets grilling over coals merged with the exotic aroma of flavoured tobacco from the Middle East being smoked through nargileh water-pipes.
Sarajevo’s merchants at the time faithfully reflected the city’s diversity, with Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews all firmly rooted in the trading community. Baedeker warned foreign visitors about the difficulties of price negotiations in the bazaar, saying ‘purchases cannot well be made without an interpreter’. To avoid the holy days observed by such a spread of faiths, Wednesday was kept as the official weekly market day; and early twentieth-century photographs, taken at roughly the time Princip was first nosing around, capture the bazaar thronged with sellers and buyers from outlying rural communities. The pictures show market alleys lined with walnut-faced farmers, their skin tempered by the extremes of weather, crouching in the dust next to sacks of fruit, herbs and other farm produce, as primitive weighing scales are hoisted shoulder-high to measure purchases.
Prices for dearer items such as gold might be negotiated in more discreet wooden jewellers’ booths erected as small shops running alongside the fronts of large stone storerooms dating from the early Ottoman era. The timberwork was often burned, destroyed and replaced during Sarajevo’s more turbulent spasms – a fate that would be repeated during the shelling of the 1990s – yet the substantial masonry warehouses behind were sturdy enough to survive. As I studied the photographs, my imagination projected a soundtrack of bells on a market caught between Europe and Asia Minor: tinkling bells from traditional Ottoman-style water sellers proffering drinks in polished metal cups holstered on their belts, and from modern trams announcing their departure back towards the railway terminus.
A few Western suits and modern hats are visible in the pictures, but traditional outfits from Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups dominate, lending an air of Eastern exoticism to what is geographically a European city. These costumes were not rare subjects that visiting photographers chose to highlight; but appeared standard for that time. Indeed as recently as 1937, when Rebecca West passed through Sarajevo on her first visit, she described seeing the same outfits: men from mountain communities in felt leggings, embroidered waistcoats and baggy trouse
rs, their heads topped with an Ottoman-style fez or maybe a woollen cap or a swirl of cloth twisted into a turban. Dress was then used as a cultural indicator, and the different ethnic groups of Bosnia visiting the city clung proudly to the sartorial signature passed down from earlier generations. Women from Bosnian Muslim communities were pictured wearing veils over their heads, but many also had their faces covered completely by black cloth, without even a slit for eyes, nose or mouth. In the mid-1870s Arthur Evans recorded that, although Bosnia was the Ottoman Empire’s most distant western province, its public displays of adherence to Islam were so strong as to appear fanatical. ‘In Bosnia, in general, women are veiled and secluded as they are veiled and secluded nowhere else in Europe.’
The search for an education had drawn Princip to Sarajevo, and within a few days of his arrival he was taken by his older brother, Jovo, to enrol at school. The original newspaper notice that his brother spotted had promised places at the city’s Austro-Hungarian Military Academy and this is where the young boy would have started his education, had not a shopkeeper apparently intervened. According to Dedijer, Jovo had stopped to buy his younger brother fresh underwear and shirts, when the merchant told Jovo, ‘Do not give the child to an institution in which he will be uprooted and become an executioner of his own people.’ Only through the last-minute intervention of a politically minded shopkeeper did the young man who would bring down the Habsburgs avoid being indoctrinated as one of their imperial cadets. At the suggestion of the outfitter, Jovo looked elsewhere, arranging a place for his younger brother at the Merchants’ School, one of the many buildings on the city-centre grid so recently constructed by the Austro-Hungarians. The 1908 map places it close to the prominent Catholic Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, which itself had only been completed a few years before – a political statement by the city’s new Catholic occupiers: Western Christian bell-towers were to take their place on the Sarajevo skyline alongside those famous minarets. The first term of the school year did not start until September, so Princip had a few weeks in which to get to know the city that one day would be for ever linked to his name.