![]() The previous day had been cool and rainy, but on the morning of 28 June the city was bathed in hot sunshine. The minarets of numerous mosques could be seen rising from among the trees and buildings along the river, a reminder of the city’s Ottoman past. ![]() Further up were the cemeteries with their glowing dots of white marble, crowned by dark firs and buffs of naked rock. The hillsides were dotted with villas and houses standing in orchards. On either side, steep hills rise to a height of over 5,000 feet. Sarajevo lies in a narrow valley watered by the Miljacka, which gushes from a gorge just above the town. A picturesque view unfolded before the couple as the motorcade swung onto the Appel Quay, driving eastward along the river. Princip was arrested immediately after the assassination and died in captivity a few months before the war ended in what is now the Czech Republic.On the morning of Sunday 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Countess Sophie Chotek von Chotkowa und Wognin, arrived by train in the city of Sarajevo and joined a motorcade for the ride to the city hall. World War I would eventually cost some 14 million lives, including 5 million civilians and 9 million military personnel. Milorad Dodik, a Bosnian Serb leader present at the monument unveiling said that the statue's inauguration amounted to "fighting for freedom today." Questions being asked about security arrangements on royal tour. Sarajevo last year marked 100 years since the assassination, but Serbian and Bosnian Serb leaders shunned the event on account of Princip's divisive legacy. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Duchess Sophie received fatal gunshot wounds, officials have confirmed. At the outbreak of World War I, most Muslims and Croats preferred to stay a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Serbs in Bosnia regard Princip as a hero, while the nation's Croats and Muslims widely view him as a killer and nationalist who sought to have Bosnia occupied by Serbia. Princip's legacy has long been a source of controversy in the Balkans, a region still sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, and which emerged from an ethnically fueled war in the 1990s that followed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The Ottoman Empire, Britain and later Italy and the United States also joined the fighting. ![]() Princip, a Serbian nationalist opposed to the Austrian-Hungarian empire's occupation of his country, shot dead Ferdinand, heir to the imperial throne, on Jin Sarajevo, precipitating the chain of events that sent Europe tumbling into World War I.Īustria held Serbia responsible for the assassination of the Archduke, and with the support of Germany, Austria attacked Serbia, whose allies, Russia and France, were soon entangled in the conflict. To the many outside of Serbia who view Princip as a terrorist, Nikolic said, "others can think what they want." "Gavrilo Princip was a hero, a symbol of the idea of freedom, the assassin of tyrants and the carrier of the European idea of liberation from slavery," Nikolic told the crowd. "Today, we are not afraid of the truth," Nikolic said. Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic described Princip as a freedom fighter and a hero. Gavrilo Princip, whose two-meter bronze likeness was unveiled before a crowd of hundreds in central Belgrade still fuels controversy in the ethnically-divided Balkans. Serbia on Sunday inaugurated a monument to the man whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand ignited World War I.
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