The bridge is just one of many bridges. Sure, it's a bit older than most in the town (constructed in wood first in 1541 and replaced with a stone bridge in 1567) but with all the damage it has sustained in an 18th C flood and in the recent war, it's been at least partially rebuilt a few times. I sit in a cafe just a hundred feet from it. Cars and trams rush by me as I watch streams of people crossing over the bridge leisurely (Sarajevans have perfected the art of the stroll). Except for the small memorial across the street from the north end of the bridge, the bridge offers no hint to its historical significance. But before the 4 year siege of this city, before the bombing and the shelling and the sniper fire raining from the surrounding hillsides, there were two footprints cast into the sidewalk. These two footprints memorialized Gavrilo Princip, the young man who was part of a nationalist group called Black Arm that conspired to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
I don't know if it's that I'm getting older and therefore I have grown a sense of history (personal and cultural) or if it's the way I am able to experience history through travel, but I'm sure at some point, someone tried to teach me the fundamentals of World War One and it never quite took. Never having a knack for rote memorization, I remember way more about the book All Quiet on the Western Front and the poem "Dulce Decorum Est," than I do dates, places, facts given to me outside the context of a story.
The story of the assassination and how that story is remembered here in Sarajevo now resonates with me. It's a story of mistakes and mishaps. It's a story of two young men so proud of their country and armed so thoroughly with a belief in a Greater Serbia that they fell sick with nationalism.
Gavrilo was only one of a number of conspirators, 7 in all, lined up along the street that the Archduke's caravan would tour. Each of the 7 was armed and willing to attack if he had the chance. The first attempt came from the 2nd in the line; a 19 year-old student, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, a name hardly anyone remembers, actually launched a hand grenade at Ferdinand's car in front of the National Library (a building that now stands as an empty shell, a reminder of the recent war and how the Serbs bombed it and burned over 2 million books). The driver spotted something flying toward them and sped up the car. The grenade hit the next car and injured two people in it and some of the spectators. Cabrinovic swallowed a cyanide pill and jumped into the river to avoid capture but his suicide attempt failed as well; he was pulled from the water by police and he subsequently threw up the poison.
The actual assassination succeeded only because of happenstance and miscommunication. The Archduke later decided to visit the injured members of his party at the hospital. His driver didn't get or didn't remember the route he was supposed to take which would have avoided the river promenade, the site of the hand grenade attempt, all together. Gavrilo, hungry from all the conspiring, had stopped into a local sandwich shop. He was leaving the store when he saw the Archduke's car heading his way. He dropped the sandwich in favor of his pistol and ran outside to the corner and shot as the driver was backing up to correct his directional mistake.
Gavrilo shot from a distance of about 5 feet hitting Ferdinand and his pregnant wife, Sophia. At least that's the story I heard.
Today, on the site of the former sandwich shop stands a small plaque memorializing the events at the bridge and the role these events played in the historical hurricane that followed. The bridge, officially known as "The Latin Bridge" has long been referred to as "Princip's Bridge" as he was long regarded as a hero by fellow citizens who wanted independence from Austria. Our guide, a young woman named Daljia, admitted that even though Princip is no longer an "official" hero and in some circles the mere mention of his name is enough to start an argument, most Sarajevans still refer to the bridge as "Princip's."
This verbal fission is interesting to me in what it reveals about Sarajevo specifically and the former Yugoslavia generally. The two footprints that were cast in the sidewalk to memorialize the shooting and thus celebrate the call for a Yugoslav nation stood in a long line of other memorials at that spot. First came memorials to Ferdinand and his wife Sophia, memorials that were erected by the Austrians and placed on Bosnian ground during the First World War. Read as an act of a foreign invader, these memorials were promptly removed with the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918. That is only the beginning of the battle for the power to determine how Princip's act is memorialized and therefore interpreted. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes placed a small plaque high on the wall above where Princip stood which read, "Princip Proclaimed Freedom..." and then gave the date. The plaque which was to be dedicated in early February of 1930 created an international outrage that had the likes of Winston Churchill weighing in. In response to the global outcries about the memorial (and a possible fear of losing valuable financial support from the West), the Kingdom did compromise and cancel the elaborate dedication ceremony it had planned for the unveiling.
11 years later, during the early Nazi occupation of Sarajevo, the plaque was dismantled and presented to Hitler on his 52nd birthday. Hitler's henchmen in the media went on to pen Princip and other conspirators were Jews and part of the "Jewish menace" that had so long delayed Yugoslavian freedom.
When the Communists liberated Sarajevo from Nazi occupation in 1945, the nationalistic interpretation (Princip's act was heroic and represented all the young Bosnian-Serbs who have died for their dream of a free and sovereign state) again gained momentum and credence. And those in charge were quick to put up another plaque that read, "The youth of Bosnia and Herzegovina dedicate this plaque as a symbol of eternal gratitude to Gavrilo Princip and his comrads, to fighters against the Germanic conquerers." Subtlety be damned.
And the battle goes on.
With that abbreviated and incomplete narrative (as I heard it) of the different memorials and therefore different interpretations of Princip and his deed, it's clear that this physical urban space is heavy with possible meanings. When the Serb Nationalists surrounded the city and began pounding it with artillery in 1992, Muslims under siege attacked the memorial as it was then, the two footprints, steadfast and heroic. In a symbolic act of erasure, the Muslims bombed the sidewalk and thus rejected Princip, his act of violence, and his dream of a Greater Serbia.
Today, as we walked down the street listening to our guide, I was taken by surprise when she pointed out the place where Princip wrote himself into history. If I hadn't been paying close attention, I would have missed the site completely. Today's memorial clearly communicates how complicated the event it is charged with memorializing. My first instinct is to "read" what it's saying. Is it celebration? Is it a nod to the importance of memory? I can't help but think of all the spatial texts that have been written here and obliterated before this one. It's obvious that the memorial can't be too much of anything. It's an awfully tight rope this urban space has to walk with shadowed shoes, pinned in between the burden of memory and the horror of forgetfulness.
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