GAVRILO PRINCIP - ASSASSIN AND PATRIOT

BIJELJINA, APRIL 27 /SRNA/ – Mlada Bosna member Gavrilo Princip /1894–1918/, whose assassination of Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo served Vienna as a pretext for a military invasion of Serbia, died on April 28 as a result of years of torture in the Czech camp of Terezin.

Princip was born in July 1894 near Grahovo. His health had been fragile from early childhood, and he suffered from tuberculosis. He attended a commercial school in Sarajevo, later a Grammar school, from which he was expelled after it was discovered that he was a member of an anti-Austrian organisation. For the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, 25 young members of Mlada Bosna, who sought an end to Austro-Hungarian occupation and the creation of a South Slavic state, were brought to trial on October 12, 1914. Of the six assassins, five were under the age of 21, which, under the law at the time, made them minors. On October 29, they were sentenced to long prison terms and death by hanging. Gavrilo, being a minor, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He initially served his sentence in Sarajevo and later in Terezín, in what is now the Czech Republic. On the wall of his cell in Terezín, Princip inscrabed: “Our shadows will wander through Vienna, wander the court, frightening the lords…” Gavrilo Princip died on April 28, 1918, just a few months before the collapse of Austro-Hungary. In 1921, the authorities of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians transferred the remains of the Mlada Bosna members to Sarajevo, where they were buried in a common tomb, the Chapel of the St. Vitus Heroes. A bridge in Sarajevo, near the site of the assassination, received a memorial plaque and was named after Gavrilo Princip in 1918. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the authorities of the FBiH and the city of Sarajevo changed the bridge’s name back to Latin Bridge and removed the plaque. Gavrilo Princip’s birth house was burned during World War II, rebuilt in 1964 as a museum preserving the memory of the hero from the border region, and then burned again during the 1992–95 war. The car in which the Austrian heir rode, Gavrilo’s pistol, and the blood-stained uniform of Franz Ferdinand are kept in the Military History Museum in Vienna. The bullet that killed Ferdinand is exhibited in the Czech town of Konopiště.