By the nineteenth century the age of Ottoman expansionism had passed, reducing considerably Bosnia’s value to Istanbul. Along with other areas on the periphery of the empire, Bosnia became a remote and increasingly troublesome backwater. As part of my research I visited the imperial archive in Istanbul, seeking a flavour of the late Ottoman rule that the Princips would have known. There were no references in the entire collection to the family under any of its three names, unsurprising given their lowly peasant status. But there were several written reports that referred to the area surrounding Obljaj, painting a picture of imperial decline: the desertion of Arab troops deployed to Bosnia from the empire’s Middle East holdings in Arabistan, the escape of a rebel leader, the routine execution of ‘a Jew and a Christian’.
The ebbing influence of imperial authorities in Istanbul was counterbalanced in Bosnia by a rise in the power of local proxies, the south-Slav converts to Islam. To hold on to power the Ottomans had long employed ‘divide and rule’, the stalwart strategy of imperial regimes; and to deal with the large Christian population, local Muslim leaders had been favoured with higher social status as feudal lords known as begs. Furthermore, to keep the local Serb followers of Orthodox Christianity in check, Istanbul had given permission to Franciscan missionaries to work in Bosnia, maintaining monasteries and ministering to the local Catholic Croat congregation.
Down near the bottom of the pecking order were serf families such as the Princips, exploited by punitive demands for tax that rose each year, along with ever more onerous periods of military service demanded from their men. The local begs increasingly answered to nobody, ignoring occasional half-hearted attempts from Istanbul to legislate an improvement in the rights of Christians and setting their own arbitrary local taxes, which would routinely leave serfs destitute at the end of a working year. Peasant resentment erupted in a series of rebellions throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, led mostly by local Serbs overtaxed into penury and inspired by successful rebellions to the south-east, where the new, independent country of Serbia was being created, a modern recasting of the medieval nation.
When four centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia came to an end, it was through one of these uprisings – a rebellion that began in 1875 not far from where the Princip family lived. It would drag on for three years, tapping into the anger felt by those at the bottom of a regime of feudal exploitation. Several of the men from the Princip clan, including Gavrilo’s father, Petar, joined the rebel groups and took to the mountains around Obljaj with their long-barrelled guns and intimate knowledge of the terrain. From there they defied not just the Ottoman troops, but also the Bosnian Muslim elite who were fighting to protect their pre-eminent social position. Violence flared across the community’s fault lines that had been so artfully maintained by the Ottomans. Bosnian Muslim forces, supported from fortress towns, would launch reprisal raids deep into the countryside, burning Christian villages and slaughtering peasants suspected of giving succour to the rebels. The violence was so sweeping, Miljkan explained, that all the remaining Princip non-combatants were forced to flee from Obljaj, along with tens of thousands of other Serbs, mostly women, children and the elderly, heading west across the frontier, seeking sanctuary in Habsburg-occupied territory.
‘The begs were so ruthless it was not safe for our family here,’ Nikola said in support of his older brother. ‘And when our people came back, once the Turks had finally left, they found all the houses here had been burned. So for the first time, but not the last, they had to rebuild everything.’
The mountainous region around Obljaj, including the forests cloaking the lower reaches of the tent-like Mount Šator, were rebel hot zones, close enough to the frontier to attract the attention of outsiders. They included Adeline Irby, a redoubtable Englishwoman from Norfolk whose Victorian sense of Christian charity drove her to come to the assistance of Serb refugees in this remote corner of south-eastern Europe during the rebellion of 1875. Miss Irby, as she is still referred to affectionately in Bosnia, was a pioneer aid worker, a nineteenth-century prototype for the legions spread across the world’s combat zones today. Her doggedness in battling through winter snowstorms, sleeping in vermin-infested hovels and defying Ottoman attempts to hinder aid deliveries won her a huge following among Bosnian Serbs. It also generated wide publicity in Britain, especially when her cause was publicly endorsed by her good friend, Florence Nightingale. Miss Irby would dedicate the rest of her life to the advancement of Bosnian Serbs, running a school for Orthodox Christian girls in Sarajevo, where she would make her home for more than thirty years. She died there in 1911 at the age of seventy-nine and is buried today just a few yards from Princip’s tomb. Her gravestone bears a carving in profile of her doughty – some might say battleaxe – face, with an inscription describing her as ‘a great benefactress of the Serbian people in Bosnia-Herzegovina’.
The uprising that began in 1875 brought an end to Ottoman rule in Bosnia but, as became clear from the Princip family’s reminiscences, this did not herald freedom for its south-Slav population. The Great Powers, gathering in 1878 for the Congress of Berlin, which was convened to decide the fate of territory lost by the weakening Ottoman Empire, still viewed Europe as a chequerboard of land parcels to be occupied, exploited and occasionally bartered. The interests of local populations were not nearly as important as higher, strategic concerns balancing the interests of the established powers: the Russians, the Austro-Hungarians, the Germans, the British, the Ottomans, the Italians and the French.
The imperial Habsburg rulers were deeply hostile to the establishment of a new, stand-alone country in Bosnia where south Slavs might enjoy self-rule. The Habsburg Empire already had a significant south-Slav population in territory it had long ruled across the Northern Balkans. Independence for Bosnia, Vienna believed, threatened to destabilise the empire by fomenting similar calls for self-rule from Slavs within the empire. Instability was a threat that all the Great Powers shared an aversion for, so Vienna’s representatives were able to convince the other statesmen gathered at the Berlin conference that she should be allowed to occupy Bosnia. Within weeks Austro-Hungarian troops had crossed the old frontier and marched on Sarajevo.
The Foreign Minister of Austria–Hungary, Gyula Andrassy, boasted at the time that Bosnia would be taken ‘with a company of men and a brass band at their head’, but events proved him guilty of hubris. It would ultimately require the deployment of 300,000 troops by Austria–Hungary to fulfil the occupation and, later, the full annexation of Bosnia. They took the towns quickly enough, but out in the rural areas they came across entrenched hostility, mostly from the Bosnian Muslim community. Official figures showed that in the first few months alone 5,198 men from the invading Austro-Hungarian force were killed or wounded. In keeping with its history of resistance, Herzegovina was one of the last regions to fall to the new occupiers.
The Austro-Hungarians claimed their occupation of Bosnia was a philanthropic act of civilisation, a ‘cultural mission’, as they put it rather prosaically. Like so much colonialism of the era – the Scramble for Africa was taking place at the same time – outsiders routinely presented themselves as being committed to upliftment, promising to modernise, reform and advance the local population. But, just as in Africa, the philanthropy turned out to be largely a sham. Furthermore, the Ottoman legacy in Bosnia brought out many Western prejudices against Islam, the implicit message being that a Christian nation would necessarily make good the cruel, corrupt, conservative incompetence of Muslim rule.
The supposed altruism of the Habsburgs did not reach far in Bosnia. A few hundred miles of road were built by the new occupiers, but mostly out of the simple military necessity for swift mobilisation and the deployment of troops. Railway lines were laid but, again, the primary motivator was hardly to help the local community. The railway was needed in order for Austro-Hungarian investors to profit from commercial exploitation. Timber from Bosnia’s rich forests was a target of this new trade, so with
in a few years narrow-gauge railway tracks snaked across the country and up into the forests, where felled trunks could be loaded for export. The character of town centres and cityscapes changed dramatically as European architects were encouraged to express themselves through new buildings of modern Western design. Within a few years the ancient hans, caravanserais, souks and turbes left by the Ottomans had been overshadowed, symbolically and literally, by an architectural avalanche of governors’ palaces, military barracks, university buildings, cathedrals, museums and the occasional brewery.
Aside from these cosmetic changes, the fundamentals of life did not alter for the vast majority of Bosnians spread across the rural hinterland. Academics have carried out detailed studies of the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia after 1878, revealing how the new occupiers failed to modernise the country for which they were now responsible. They barely touched the old feudal system, meaning that serfdom continued here well into the twentieth century. They did not fundamentally tackle the social structure in the rural areas, where begs were still able to demand taxes set at arbitrary levels. And they set up yet further tiers of state fees that kept the peasants in penury. Their schools, built with great show in the larger urban areas like Sarajevo, made so meagre an impression on the population that by 1910, after more than three decades of Austro-Hungarian rule, 88 per cent of the Bosnian population could not read or write.
In Obljaj the arrival of the Austro-Hungarians was a long drawn-out disappointment for the Princips. Sitting in the village listening to their history brought home to me the disconnect that so often separates policy from reality. The statesmen leaving the Berlin Congress smugly convinced themselves that the people of Bosnia would benefit from the diplomatic finesse of having the Western Austro-Hungarians replace the Eastern Ottomans. What they had actually done, however, was quite the opposite, sowing seeds of resentment that would eventually destroy the status quo of the entire Western world.
‘Our people came back home to the village after the uprising and they thought things would get much better,’ Nikola said, shaking his head. ‘They built their homes again here in Obljaj and thought that, as Christians now ruled by Christians, they would be better off. But nothing changed. It was still a tough life of survival, struggling to live off this land and paying tax, tax and more tax.’
Just as under the Ottomans, various family members survived by working for the occupiers, retained as border guards or policemen for the foreign empire. I asked the family about the claim made by one historian that Princip’s uncle, Ilija, eldest brother of his father, had served for a time as an Austro-Hungarian gendarme – a question I felt was potentially important, as an influence on the young boy’s motivation for the assassination. Once more, the family memory was blank. Instead they emphasised the dire conditions of life for their forebears at the dawn of the twentieth century, and to do this convincingly all they had to do was relate what happened to six of Princip’s siblings.
‘First there was Bosiljka, who died as a child,’ Nikola said. ‘Then there was Koviljka who was next to die, and Djuradj after her, and Branko after him and two others who were never christened and died without a name.’ It was well over a hundred years since six out of nine children from one family had died, but for the Princip clan that would be too soon to forget.
After two hours of intensive listening, note-taking and tallying what I had read about Princip against what his family remembered, we all needed a break. I could not help noticing that the Princips had not offered Arnie and me coffee – a cultural ritual for visitors that I knew to be almost sacred. They were not being unfriendly. They were simply too poor.
I arched my back extravagantly, and Mile picked up on the cue. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘I need to walk a while and I want to show you something that might teach you a little about Gavro’s parents.’ Mile led Arnie and me back through the village and out onto the approach road where we had been dropped earlier that day. The sun was low in the sky and two teenage boys were walking across the fields carrying fishing rods. ‘Trout,’ he said, catching my interest keenly. Trout-fishing is a love of mine. ‘They are going after trout in the Korana. It’s a beautiful fishing river.’
There was an enthusiasm about Mile that I was beginning to enjoy, a curiosity about my interest in his ancestor. ‘So many people have said so many things about Gavro over the years,’ he said. ‘But they forget he was a country boy from this village. His world was a small world, basically the fields and forests and mountains you can see from where we are standing. He would have gone fishing, I am sure, just like those boys over there. He would have walked the hills I walked, shepherding the family’s flock of sheep like I did when I was a boy. But in those days, people from a place like this never left. They were born here, married here, worked here, died here.
‘Look at Gavro’s parents. His father, Petar – but everyone called him Pepo – was from this village. His mother was Marija – everyone called her Nana – and where did she come from? Well, if you look over there you will see where.’ He was now pointing along the valley to a collection of farm buildings less than a mile away. ‘Don’t laugh, but that is known as Little Obljaj because it is smaller than where we are now, Greater Obljaj. Nana came from there. You basically lived your whole life within walking distance of where you were brought up. And when you ended your life you still didn’t leave.’
He had led us into the local graveyard, weaving his bulky frame through grass and weeds that grew waist-high in places and past clutches of gravestones, many of which were penned behind railings inside family plots. ‘This is where Gavro’s parents lie today,’ Mile said, pointing over a black iron fence.
Some history books tell you that Princip’s father married late and was a lot older than his mother. Their shared headstone suggested otherwise. It recorded them being born in the same year, 1860, which would have made them teenagers when the rebellion of 1875 disrupted their rural lives. While Petar went up into the hills to fight, Marija headed west as a refugee to the area around Knin, a town just across the frontier inside Austro-Hungarian territory, where Miss Irby focused most of her aid effort. The headstone recorded both their baptised and familiar names, so I was able to read that Marija (Nana) died in 1945, five years after Petar (Pepo). That meant that Princip’s mother would have experienced at first hand one of the long-term after-effects of the assassination committed by her son: the Second World War. It brought another round of disruption to life in Obljaj.
‘The Germans and Italians occupied this area, and in the fighting Gavro’s house was totally destroyed,’ Mile said. ‘Poor Nana had to flee along with the others for a while. By the time she died she had suffered so much because of the actions of her son and was drinking a lot. They say it was the drink that killed her in the end.’
We were now out in a recently mown hayfield, with clear sight of the red tiled roofs of Obljaj that run along the hinge between the valley floor and the rocky hillock behind. Take away the power lines and replace the stone tiles with shingles, and the view had not changed since Princip’s time. Mile stood still for a moment and started to speak. ‘The thing that still amazes me about Gavro is how a child from this small place and from that closed time could change the world.’ Down on the river bank I could see a boy sitting patiently and watching his fishing line drift in the slow-moving current.
As we walked back into Obljaj I thought about how static life had been over the centuries for a family such as the Princips. They had been chained to this upland valley, not in the sense of being anchored and given stability, but more in the sense of being trapped, hocked, unable to escape its demands. We, in the twenty-first century, so often romanticise the idyll of pre-urban, agricultural simplicity, but the existence led by the Princips, as for peasants across Europe down the centuries, was far from idyllic. Theirs was a living defined by a crushing yearly battle, trying to husband enough crops and livestock to survive the deprivations of winter and the demands of feudal obligation. As Serbs, the
irs was an identity most strongly preserved by the annual cycle of devotions enshrined by their Orthodox Church and by stories told around the fire about the medieval heroes of a long-gone Serbian state. Little wonder those tales were worked up into legends of mythological dimension – the chivalrous deeds of Serbian nobles fighting for good against the evil of occupation.
Gavrilo Princip was born in the summer of 1894, a busy time for a peasant family living off the land in Herzegovina. Marija had spent the day in the fields bundling hay by hand and milking the family cow, when her labour pains came. She had only just made it back into the house when the baby arrived. Family lore has her mother-in-law biting through the umbilical cord. It was 13 July, a day sacred in the Orthodox calendar for the Archangel Gabriel, and although Marija wanted to name the newborn Špiro, in honour of her late brother, the parish priest insisted the child be named for the saint. Gavrilo is the name Gabriel in Serbian. The baptism was carried out swiftly. Nobody could be confident that the new baby would not suffer the same fate as many of his siblings.
‘He was born just up there,’ Nikola told me after we had returned to the house. Miljkan was too immobile to comfortably leave the verandah, but at seventy-seven years of age his younger brother was still sprightly enough to lead me to the next-door plot and was now standing in front of the roofless void where the old stable had been set into the slope of the hill. ‘Up there, just behind, was the main room where the family lived and the food was prepared.’ Nikola was now pointing to a flat section of grassy ground at the same level as the top of the stable. ‘They used to have a hearth in there for cooking, and the smoke went out of a hole in the roof. The floor was made of earth and used to be swept clean every day. The other room, where they slept, was towards us, above where the animals lived, with a wooden floor.’