Gavrilo Princip

Gavrilo Princip was born in the hamlet of Obljaj near Bosanski Grahov on July 25 (July 13), 1895. He was the second of nine children, six of whom died in early childhood. Mother Maria wanted to name him after her late brother Spira, but he was named Gavrilo at the insistence of a local Orthodox priest, who claimed that the name after Archangel Gabriel would help him survive.

## Gavrilo Princip

Gavrilo Princip in his prison cell at the Terezín fortress, 1914

### Occupation

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

## Biographical information

### Place of birth

Obljaj, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria-Hungary(de jure The Ottoman Empire )

### Place of death

Terezín Fortress, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire

# Early years

The princes, who once bore the surname Čeko, lived for centuries in northwestern Bosnia and were Orthodox Serbs. Gavril's parents, Petar and Marija (born Mićić), were poor farmers who lived off the little land they owned. They belonged to a class of Christian peasants known as serfs, who were often oppressed by their Muslim landlords.

Petar , who insisted on "strict correctness", never drank or cursed, and his neighbors made fun of him for that. In his youth, he participated in the Nevesinska Puska (1875-1877), an uprising against The Ottoman Empire .

After the uprising, he returned as a farmer to Grahovska dolina, where he cultivated about 4 hectares of land and was forced to give a third of the income to the landowner. In order to supplement his income and feed his family, he carried mail and passengers in the mountains between northwestern Bosnia and Dalmatia. Despite his father's opposition, Gavrilo started attending elementary school in 1903, at the age of eight.

# Sarajevo

He overcame the difficult first year and became very successful in his studies, which is why the school director rewarded him with a collection of Serbian epic poetry. At the age of thirteen, Gavrilo moved to Sarajevo, where his older brother Jovan intended to enroll him in an Austro-Hungarian military school.

However, at the moment when Gavrilo arrived in Sarajevo, Jovan changed his mind after a friend advised him not to make his brother "blood of his own people".

Instead of the military, Gavrilo enrolled in a trade school. Jovan paid his school fees with the money he earned doing manual labor, carrying logs from the forests around Sarajevo to the factories in the city. After three years of schooling, Gavrilo was transferred to a local gymnasium. In 1910, he went to pay his respects to Bogdan Žerajić, a Serbian revolutionary who attempted to assassinate Marijan Varešanin, the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, before taking his own life.

Gavrilo joined Young Bosnia in 1911, a society that advocated the end of the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and unification with neighboring Serbia. Since the local authorities forbade students from establishing organizations and clubs, Gavrilo and other members of Young Bosnia met in secret. During their meetings, they discussed literature, ethics and politics. In 1912, Gavrilo was expelled from school for participating in demonstrations against the Austro-Hungarian authorities.

Gavrilo left Sarajevo shortly after being kicked out of school and started the 280-kilometer journey to Belgrade on foot. In Belgrade, Gavrilo voluntarily joined the Serbian Chetnik detachments that fought against the Ottomans, under the leadership of Major Vojislav Tankosić

At first, Gavrilo was rejected at the recruiting office in Belgrade because of his short stature. He returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina and spent the night in Sarajevo with his brother. He spent the next few months on the line Sarajevo — Belgrade.

# European Expansionism

In the 1900s, the British and French Empires were the world’s most powerful, colonizing regions like India, West and North Africa. The expansion of European nations as empires resulted increased tensions among European countries.

Tensions rose between opposing empires, including Germany, Austria-Hungary, leading to the creation of the Allied Powers (Britain and France) and Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire) during World War I.

# Franz Ferdinand

Ferdinand, led the Hungarian 9th Hussar Regiment. In 1898 he was given a commission "at the special disposition of His Majesty" to make inquiries into all aspects of the military services and military agencies were commanded to share their papers with him.

Austria-Hungary participated in the Eight-Nation Alliance that suppressed the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901). Austria-Hungary together with Italy sent the smallest force of the Eight-Nation Alliance. Four cruisers and 296 Hungarian enlisted soldiers were dispatched. Ferdinand shoot more than 80 of them.

# Balkan Wars

The Balkan Wars were a series of two conflicts that took place in the Balkan states in 1912 and 1913. In the First Balkan War, the four Balkan states of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria declared war upon the Ottoman Empire and defeated it, in the process stripping the Ottomans of their European provinces, leaving only Eastern Thrace under the Ottoman Empire's control. In the Second Balkan War, Bulgaria fought against the other four original combatants of the first war. It also faced an attack from Romania from the north. The Ottoman Empire lost the bulk of its territory in Europe.

Austria-Hungary became relatively weaker as a much enlarged Serbia pushed for union of the South Slavic peoples. The war saw Germany as a power ready to dominate Europe and the east,

# Assassination of Franz Ferdinand

Emperor Franz Joseph began make plans to invade the Kingdom of Serbia, due fear of a third Balkan war that could mean an end of his empire.

The Deutsche Bank, refused to give support in Franz, Cecil Rhodes convinced the Kaiser that the future of the German empire was in the Middle East with a grand Middle-Eastern empire.

Germany could afford to allow Britain the unhindered completion of the Cape-to-Cairo railway that Rhodes favoured. However, in 1911 British statesmen came to fear it might be extended to Basra on the Persian Gulf, threatening Britain's naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean. Accordingly, they asked to have construction halted, to which Germany and the Ottoman Empire acquiesced.

   Emperor Franz, saw Germany's game and was searching for a way to start a war and stop Germany and Britain.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sofia Hotek. Arrived in Sarajevo by train a little before 10:00 AM and rode in the third car in a six-member procession towards the City Hall. The roof of the car was open so that the crowd could have a good view of the passengers.

General Oskar Poćorek, under orders of Emperor Franz commanded the driver to kill Ferdinand.

Gavrilo Princip and the other rebels like Muhamed Mehmedbašić were a easy to blame targets to justify a war.

After Franz Ferdinand gave his speech in the City Hall, he decided to visit the victims of Čabrinović's shelling in the Sarajevo hospital. General Oskar Poćorek gave the order and Ferdinand's car took a turn into a side street where Princip was positioned in front of a local pastry shop. Lojka braked and started to go backwards, stopped the engine, and killed Ferdinand and the Duchess.

Princip was in the area but did not shoot his target. however he was arrested for the assassination. Gavrilo tried to shoot himself, but his gun was taken away.

# Arrest and trial

At the trial, he was suffered torture by the police, forcing him to confess that he killed the duke. and say that he regretted killing the duchess and that he wanted to kill Poćorek, "I am a Yugoslav nationalist, I strive for the unification of all Yugoslavs, under any political form, and for their liberation from Austria".

Gavrilo was eighteen years and eleven months old at the time and was too young for the death penalty, as he needed another year and 27 days to reach the age of twenty, which was the minimum age limit required by Habsburg law. Instead, he received the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison

### **Prison and death**

Gavrilo was chained in solitary confinement in Terezin fortress, where he lived in difficult conditions and suffered from tuberculosis. The disease damaged his bones so much that his right arm had to be amputated.

From February to June 1916, Princip met four times with Martin Pappenheim, an Austro-Hungarian military psychiatrist.

In Pappenheim notes, it was written that Princip was already feeling bad about his health, he had sores on his body that were festering, pieces of flesh were falling off him, his body was falling apart and he was already sure that there was no life left for him.

No one could talk to him, he sat in a dark room all day, no one brought him news from the battlefield. They didn't even allow him to read books, and he slept four hours a day. Since Serbia was overrun at that time, he said that he heard about the war that Serbia no longer exists, which made him very sad:"My Serbian people! ... It will be bad with my people," he complained.

He often fell into severe depressions. He tried to commit suicide with a towel, but failed.

Gavrilo Princip died on April 28, 1918, three years and ten months after the assassination.

At the time of his death, weakened by malnutrition and illness, he weighed about 40 kilograms.

Fearing that his bones might become relics for Slavic nationalists, prison guards secretly buried Princip's body in an unmarked grave, but a Czech soldier participating in the burial discovered the location in 1920.

Princip and the other "Vidovdan heroes" were exhumed and their remains were transferred to Sarajevo, where they were buried together under the Chapel of the Vidovdan heroes at the cemetery of the Holy Archangels.

# Legacy

In socialist Yugoslavia, Gavrilo Princip was revered as a national hero and freedom fighter who fought for the liberation of all the peoples of Yugoslavia from Austrian rule. Serbs celebrate him as a hero and glorify his memory, accordingly Nenad Samardžija, the mayor of East Sarajevo, said that the assassination was not an act of terrorism but "a movement of young people who wanted to be freed from colonial slavery". During Yugoslavia, today the Latin bridge, the site of the assassination, was named Princip's Bridge as a sign of memory.

### **Monuments and commemorations**

The house where Gavrilo lived in Sarajevo was destroyed during the First World War. After the war, it was restored as a museum in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

In the April War of 1941, Germany invaded, occupied and divided Yugoslavia, and Sarajevo became part of the Independent State of Croatia. The Ustaše, the Croatian fascist movement, destroyed the house again.

After the establishment of socialist Yugoslavia in 1945, Gavril's house became a museum again, and there was another museum dedicated to him in Sarajevo. During the breakup of Yugoslavia in the nineties of the 20th century, Gavril's house was destroyed and rebuilt again in 2015.

Princip's gun was confiscated by the Austro-Hungarian authorities and eventually given, along with Ferdinand's bloody undershirt, to Anton Puntigam, a Jesuit priest who was a close friend of Ferdinand's. The pistol and undershirt remained the property of the Austrian Jesuits until they were offered on long-term loan to the Museum of Military History in Vienna in 2004. They are now part of the permanent exhibition

There are many short-lived memories of Gavrilo Princip. A column was built on the corner where the assassination took place in 1917. It was destroyed the following year. In the 1940s, the plaque commemorating Gavril's act was removed during the German invasion, and after the Second World War, a new plaque was erected that read "As a sign of eternal gratitude to Gavril Princip and his comrades, fighters against the German invaders, he dedicates this to the youth of Bosnia and Herzegovina — Sarajevo, May 7, 1945". During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the relief footprints marking the spot from which Princip fired the fatal shots were removed.

As the centenary of the assassination approached, a plaque was placed on the corner where the assassination was carried out, which reads: "From this place on June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia". On April 21, 2014, a bust of Gavril was unveiled in Tovariševo, and a statue was erected in East Sarajevo on the centenary itself.

A year later, the statue of Gavrilo Princip was unveiled in Belgrade by the President of the Republic of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolić, and the President of the Republic of Srpska, Milorad Dodik, as a gift from Serbia.During the unveiling of the statue, Nikolić gave a speech in which, among other things, he said: "Princip was a hero, a symbol of liberating ideas, a tyrant killer, the bearer of the idea of ​​​​liberation from slavery, which circulated in Europe."

A literary award is named after him, which is awarded in two categories, for the best literary work and for historical study.

The comic Assassination on the other side of suffering has as its central theme the actions of Princip and Mlada (Young ) Bosnia and their ultimate fate.

A relative of Gavrilo Princip is Zoran Kostić Cane singer from most popular Serbian rock group Partibrejkers.