One Morning in Sarajevo by David James Smith

Author:David James Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W&N

18

June 1914 – on the Avenue of Assassins

Thinking of grainy images, both still moving, of young men in groups, 80 or more years later, arriving at American airports, boarding American planes, or entering a British railway station carrying their backpacks full of explosives, all on their way to commit murder and to make martyrs of themselves, it is tempting to wonder what CCTV cameras peering backwards into history from future technology might have recorded of the appearance and the movement of Gavro and Nedjo and their fellow conspirators on the morning of 28 June 1914.

They would not have been sporting baseball caps and logo tops and leisure wear, that’s for sure. The conspirators that day, or many of them, wore their stiff-collared shirts and ties; their suits and their fedora hats. I think it likely their clothes were worn and frayed. Perhaps their suits were dusty and unpressed; perhaps they had holes in the toes of their socks and the soles of their shoes. Or perhaps they put on their church best for this special occasion, setting out to make their mark on history. With one exception there was no record of the young men’s appearance that day, so, at best, we are in the realms of informed speculation; though that one record certainly helps.

Like the passengers on the tube trains and the planes, as with the people in the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, the Archduke and the Duchess had no idea what lay in wait for them.

They might have feared but could never have guessed, as they journeyed slowly down Appel Quay to the town hall in their luxury car that they were passing through ‘a regular avenue of assassins’, as the Archbishop of Sarajevo would later describe it, when the full story, or as much of it as we can ever now know, became known. The Archbishop was Josip Stadler, a Croat priest who had revived the Catholic Church in Sarajevo after years of Ottoman rule. He had overseen the building of the cathedral and had been personally appointed by the pope to become the first ever archbishop.

Those assassins had no plans to survive the day themselves. They were all – almost all – ready to die and had the means to do it.

After returning home to leave his dog behind, Nedjo had walked into town and went to the book store of Basagic, which may have been a place where students gathered in the early morning to read the newspapers of the day. This must have been the premises of Safvetbeg Basagic, a renowned Muslim Croatian who was an intellectual and collector of Islamic manuscripts and other books and texts, while also writing a substantial volume of work himself. He later became curator of a prominent Sarajevo museum.

At some point that morning, very likely at Basagic’s, Nedjo acquired a copy of Narod, the Serb daily, which had celebrated the visit of the Archduke by ignoring it altogether and choosing instead to evoke memories of St Vitus Days gone by.

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