With the 1914 assassination having been the subject of intense scrutiny over the last hundred years, I had not expected to find new Princip material when I humped my gear off the tram that ran me into the city centre. Not only had generations of historians hunted the same quarry, but I was sensitive that many in the city might retain an uninterested, even hostile attitude towards the assassin. This seemed to explain the response I received the first morning after arriving, when I approached the board of the museum that stands next to the spot where the assassination took place.
They could not have been less interested. Phone calls went unreturned, messages ignored. I eventually managed to track down the chairman, but when I asked about the Merchants’ School he shrugged his shoulders. He did not know where in the city it had been located, had no interest in finding its records, and no, he did not have any ideas about any aspect of Princip’s life, beyond the few details on display in the museum. If I wanted to contact the museum again, I was to write formally in advance and wait until I was informed that my approach had been officially approved. Follow-up emails all went unanswered. It was very disappointing. A tour around the museum showed up errors in what little Princip material it held. Perhaps I would be better off looking elsewhere anyway.
The museum’s attitude chimed with a warning given to me by my oldest friend from Sarajevo, Amela Filipović. She is a lawyer whose life, like that of the entire city, had been put on hold by the turbulence of the war. To survive she had worked with foreign journalists as a translator, for a long time enduring the ghastly commute past snipers and mortar barrages to the Holiday Inn hotel, which for several years was Sarajevo’s journalistic hub. Even though it had been so long since we had last met, when I contacted her again she was kind enough to invite me to stay in her flat in the Skenderija district of central Sarajevo.
With her career now firmly back on track, running her own successful city-centre legal practice, Amela was about to take her daughter for a summer holiday down on the Adriatic coast, and I was welcome to use the guestroom. I had only visited her flat once during the war, at a time when her father, invalided through a stroke, was still living there – a particularly painful time for a family struggling for dignity and normality within the failing body of a besieged city. The surrounding slopes that had offered the city protection in the Ottoman era had become a source of menace, occupied by hostile Bosnian Serb forces and their artillery pieces; and nowhere more so than in Skenderija, which lies right at the foot of Mount Trebević, one of Sarajevo’s most dramatic peaks and one that was in the hands of Bosnian Serb forces for the duration of the war.
After greeting Amela warmly and looking around the beautifully refurbished apartment, among the reminiscences welling up between us was her recollection of my single visit here. ‘I remember it so well,’ she said. ‘It was the summer of 1994 and you brought us all supplies in your Land Rover. In particular, I will never forget the flowers that you gave us. You made a lot of people happy that day.’
It took hours to catch up properly, to hear about her father’s death, the troubled rebirth of the city following the Dayton peace treaty and all the resulting turns in her life. We took a stroll near her flat, and I complained about the problems I was having exploring the back-story of Princip. She tried to console me. ‘This is a city which does not look after its history properly. The city authorities are too focused on its politics now to care about anything in the past. Just look at that,’ she said, pointing at a muddled assortment of masonry fragments scattered across an abandoned piece of land that we were walking past. They were clearly ages old. ‘We have plenty of rich history here, but nobody bothers to look after it. Can you imagine this sort of thing in Britain? If these sorts of artefacts were in London, they would be displayed behind a fence with a sign explaining where they come from, not left like a rubbish dump.’
Determined to keep looking, and hoping that I might yet find new flotsam from Princip missed by earlier historians, I trooped between the many museums and archives that still exist in Sarajevo: the National Archive, the National Museum, the Museum of History, the Jewish Museum, the National Gallery, the Historical Archives and various sub-departments of the History Faculty at the city’s main university. It was a frustrating and, at times, disheartening experience. The librarian at the National Museum told me how the whole establishment was facing imminent closure because of a budgetary row along ethnic lines, between the complex governmental structures born in Bosnia out of the Dayton peace accord. When she showed me into the library the main door still had shrapnel damage from the 1990s, when mortar rounds detonated outside. Within a few weeks of my visit the museum’s doors would be closed; the librarian was owed a year’s salary.
My breakthrough finally came at the much smaller Historical Archives, a modest building I must have passed unknowingly many times during the war. It stands on the main road that led up to where the UN military headquarters had been located, although back in the 1990s the archive was as non-operational as the broken traffic lights a short walk away outside Bosnia’s presidency building. I remembered them hanging forlornly over a major junction, ignored by the occasional vehicle with enough fuel to be out on the roads. The archive director, Haris Zaimović, was a young man and I immediately warmed to his curiosity and enthusiasm. His positive response to my approach could not have been more different from that of the museum authorities I had been tangling with to date. When he told me that in the archive’s holdings were many of the original report books from the main Sarajevo schools set up during the Austro-Hungarian colonial period, I worked out the exact dates of Princip’s school years and, between us, we began a focused search. Within a short time we had retrieved the entire paper record of Princip’s secondary education in Bosnia.
Dedijer, the author whose work from the 1960s still dominates the received history of Princip, paints his early years in Sarajevo as ones of stability, both at school and where he lodged. Dedijer has him performing consistently in the classroom and staying in Sarajevo only with the widow, Ilić. ‘The first three years in the Merchants’ School were rather uneventful for Gavrilo,’ he wrote in The Road to Sarajevo. A different picture emerged from the original school reports that I found.
Hidden for more than a hundred years within Sarajevo’s shifting and sometimes arcane network of officialdom, the reports catalogue in meticulous detail a student going off the rails. The fall of this Gabriel begins after he performed brilliantly in his first school year in Sarajevo, an exemplary A-grade student, but one for whom stability was clearly lacking. The documents show his address changing six times in four years as he roamed rootless and often penniless, supported by a scholarship for only part of one of his four completed school years. By the time Princip finally left school in Sarajevo, the student whose first-year performance was given a First Class Diploma with Honours (the highest possible ranking allowed for by the Austro-Hungarian education system) was now rated D in most subjects. His absenteeism surged to 199 lessons missed, and he was obliged to resit that year’s final examination in Latin. These rediscovered school reports provided the clearest evidence of the teenage transformation undergone by Princip.
After so much research filtered through books by others, it was electrifying to have in front of me the 1907–8 school-year report for pupil number 32 of Class Ib of Trgovačka Škola u Sarajevu, the First Grade of the city’s Merchants’ School. The file had been glued inside a marbled ledger, the cover page bearing an official stamp in purpling ink from the headmaster’s office. On a grid the class’s ten teachers had each written down the subjects they taught and had signed their names in swirly, occasionally blotchy ink from a fountain pen. The maths teacher, Mr I. Kurtović, had got into a muddle and signed his name twice, the second version imperfectly erased. Maths would clearly be useful at a school for students intending careers in commerce, but the spread of subjects taught to Princip in this first year of secondary school went way beyond standard business matters.
Along with religious instruction in the faith of the Habsburg Empire – Catholicism – students also received instruction in Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Clearly the view was that to do business in Bosnia, trainee merchants must have knowledge of the country’s different ethnic groups, and to do that you needed to know something about their religion. History was not one of the subjects on offer to the class in this first year, although language was taken very seriously. As well as the language of the occupier – German – the pupils had lessons in their native language. I was intrigued to see that the same sensitivities that I came across in the twenty-first century had applied a hundred years earlier. In the language box on the form the printed term ‘Bosnian’ had been scrawled through by someone with red ink and replaced with the handwritten term ‘Serbo-Croatian’. Use of the term ‘Bosnian’ implied the existence of a Bosnian national identity, an issue clearly of some sensitivity even at the start of the twentieth century.
Inside the folder, Princip’s name was recorded in a flourish of copperplate manuscript, his first name abbreviated to Gavro, just as his descendants had referred to him affectionately when I had listened to the family history back at the start of the journey in Obljaj. The section for recording any bursary or scholarship showed that he received nothing, and his address in Sarajevo was given as 4 Oprkanj Street.
His date of birth was correctly recorded except for the month, which was entered as June, not July as official records have it back in Obljaj – a divergence that came close to costing him his life following the assassination of the Archduke. Under the Austro-Hungarian criminal code, a prisoner guilty of a capital crime could only be executed if aged twenty or older on the day of the offence. Had he been born on 13 June 1894 he would have hanged, as that would have made him twenty when the Archduke was shot on 28 June 1914. After a long investigation – not helped when his own mother, Marija, got into a muddle over exactly when her son had been born – the best legal minds available in Austria–Hungary settled on 13 July 1894 as his actual date of birth, saving him from the death sentence by a matter of days.
The report then graded his performance through the academic year, which was divided into two long terms, each several months in duration. Although he had arrived in the city with nothing more than a rural primary-school education behind him, Princip really shone. The normal starting age for secondary education was eleven, making the thirteen-year-old new boy a little old for his first year, although the class records indicated a wide spread of ages among classmates and he was not necessarily the oldest. Such an age range was to be expected in a country with a poorly developed education system. Under Ottoman rule, schooling had been almost non-existent, something that was changing only slowly under the Austro-Hungarians. Interestingly, all the Bosnian schools Princip studied at were open to students from any of the country’s ethnic groups and there was no dogma that insisted on the reports being kept in the Western, Latin script used by the Habsburgs. Some of the reports were written in Latin script, but several others were in Cyrillic. The register for his class recorded names of Bosnian Serbs like himself alongside Jewish students, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims. The boy who ran away in fright when he saw a Sarajevan innkeeper from the Bosnian Muslim community was now living and learning alongside young people from across the ethnic spectrum.
Princip’s descendants in Obljaj had told me that he had done well at school, but the marks I found in his early school reports were extraordinary. He scored highly across all subjects and improved as the year progressed, ending with the highest possible overall grade. Maths was his best academic subject, German his worst, although here he still scored far above the average in the class. In terms of behaviour, he scored almost perfect marks for conduct and did not miss a single lesson. Princip was clearly yet to develop his troublemaking streak.
His report for the following academic year, from autumn 1908 to summer 1909, showed that he followed the standard trajectory by going up a year to Class IIb, the Second Grade. His scholarship remained nil and his address was unchanged at 4 Oprkanj, along with the same incorrectly recorded month of birth. But now his scores began to dip, his rating for behaviour being much worse, his grade for maths slipping and twenty lessons being missed across the year. The school then changed its name to the Professional Merchants’ School, and when Princip went back in autumn 1909 the Third Grade that he joined was named Class I Professional. The school report showed that this year he was the recipient of a scholarship worth 150 crowns from Prosvjeta, a Serbian cultural group, and suggested that he had moved from Oprkanj Street, recording two addresses in the city for that year: one on Franz Joseph Street, the other on Upper Bjelava Street. Another unpublished document that I came across at the Sarajevo Historical Archives, the official records of an Austro-Hungarian census carried out across their Bosnian colony on 18 April 1910, had Princip lodging at a further address, this time on Jezero Street with old family friends originally from the Obljaj area, Ačim Bozić and his wife, Staka.
His academic marks were now in free fall, with absenteeism rocketing to sixty-eight lessons missed in the first term alone of the 1909–10 year. Princip’s commitment to the Professional Merchants’ School had clearly gone, and he did not make it through to the end of the academic year. Notes in red ink recorded that on 11 May 1910 he left the Merchants’ School ‘with the permission of his parents’, although he was not giving up on school, transferring instead from the commercial school to the grammar system.
Princip’s family members in Obljaj had said that from an early age he was so bookish that he sometimes overlooked his shepherding duties, and here was proof that this bookishness had led to more academic ambitions. After an early taste of secondary education in Sarajevo through the trade school, he wanted to complete all eight grades and perhaps even go on to university – a rarity for Bosnian students at the time, when official figures for 1902 stated that only thirty locals had a university education. Princip’s aim of completing all eight grades would be impossible to fulfil if he stayed where he was at the Professional Merchants’ School, an institution designed to produce shopkeepers and traders and which did not go all the way up to the eighth grade. To be able to complete the full secondary-education cycle he would have to enter the grammar-school system.
Dedijer suggested there was another reason for Princip’s 1910 switch, claiming that the fifteen-year-old’s awareness of politics meant he now viewed the mercantile interests of the Merchants’ School as too bourgeois. Although Dedijer gives no evidence, this account chimed with the reports I had found. Whatever the motive for the switch, Princip was clearly determined to make it happen, even though it meant leaving Sarajevo temporarily and first moving to a grammar school in Tuzla, a provincial city in the north of Bosnia, for the start of the 1910–11 school year. Again, I was able to find the school report from Tuzla, although it recorded simply that Princip studied there for only the first month of the year, attending as a boarder and without any of the scholarship he had enjoyed the year before. The report recorded that no sooner had term begun than Princip left Tuzla on 7 October 1910, transferring back to Sarajevo, where a place had become available at the most prestigious school in the land, the High Gymnasium.
The founding of this showpiece institution was one of the first acts by the Austro-Hungarians when they occupied Sarajevo. After so many centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia, routinely described by Westerners as unenlightened, the establishment of a modern education system was another statement of political intent by the new colonists. The school network they set up was piecemeal, thinly covering the whole country, but it benefited many young Bosnians who would otherwise have had no meaningful education. Among them were Princip and many other activists who would work to bring down the same empire that had made possible their education.
By the time Princip came to study at the High Gymnasium in the late autumn of 1910 it was housed in a prominent, purpose-built colonial building set just back from the Appel Quay boulevard,
which was created through the straightening of the Miljacka. The school is of such historical importance that its image has appeared on Bosnian postcards and postage stamps, and lists have been published of its star alumni, including luminaries such as Ivo Andrić. Princip’s name does not make it onto those lists.
The 1910–11 school year would be the last Princip would complete in Bosnia. His report notes that he arrived at the start of the year from Tuzla, records that he had no scholarship and gives him yet another city address, this time on Mjedenica Street. After such a stellar performance in his first year at the Merchants’ School, the end-of-year grades for pupil number 21 of the High Gymnasium’s Class IVb, the Fourth Grade, make dismal reading. His highest score was a B in gymnastics and most of his other grades were D. The report says his Latin exam was retaken in the summer holiday, on 18 August 1911, some weeks after he had trekked up Mount Igman and written his doom-laden description of the forest by night. The report shows he scraped a D in the resit, still enough to allow him to go up to the next grade: Class Vb, the Fifth Grade. He would attend only the first few months of the new academic year and his Fifth Grade school report, which places him at a new address (this time on Hadji Suleyman Street), contains no performance grades. He did not attend enough classes to earn a rank as his Bosnian school career petered out, the end being marked by a teacher’s note that said simply: ‘failed to attend exam, Sarajevo, 28 Feb 1912’. Dedijer wrote that Princip was expelled for taking part in demonstrations against the Austro-Hungarian authorities, but the school records make no mention of this.