Continuing the air of ineptitude, Čabrinović tried to commit suicide. But the cyanide pill he gulped was too old and degraded to cause more than vomiting, and when he leapt into the Miljacka, he found that the meagre summer flow left him sprawled on the riverbed. He was arrested at once.
Alarmed, the convoy sped to City Hall, dashing past Princip and his two comrades. Here, a visibly unnerved Archduke gave a speech from bloodied pages – the papers had been in the fourth car. Sensibly, the couple decided to abandon their trip to the museum – and go, instead, to see the injured in the hospital.
But a call to keep them in City Hall until troops could be brought into the city was vetoed by Potiorek – partly because the soldiers had been on manoeuvres, and would not be in the correct uniforms; partly because he thought the peril had passed. “Do you think Sarajevo is full of assassins?” he asked the Archduke.
Potiorek did at least insist that the motorcade should head to the hospital by returning along the river, rather than by cutting into the labyrinth of streets at Sarajevo’s heart. But the message was not delivered to the drivers. The first two cars turned right onto the lane that is now Zelenih Beretki. When Leopold Lojka, the Archduke’s chauffeur, followed, Potiorek yelled at him to stop. Lojka slammed on the brakes, but stalled the car as he tried to put it into reverse. Princip, hanging out on the corner, could not believe his luck.
He, too, would be grabbed before he could kill himself. He escaped the death penalty by dint of his age (he would have had to be 20 at the time of the crime to face the ultimate sanction), only to perish in an Austrian-run prison, on April 28 1918 – succumbing to tuberculosis. He was entirely aware of the inferno that his actions had ignited; that Austro-Hungary had declared war on the Serbia it held responsible for the assassination; that alliances had dragged Germany, France, Britain and Russia into the fray. He was 23.
Stroll across Sarajevo today, and the scene does not look far removed from the flashpoint which flipped the world on its axis. City Hall still admires its reflection in the river, its vaguely Moorish architecture belying the fact that it was built by the Austrians between 1891 and 1896 – and that is was so badly damaged by enemy shelling in the 1990s siege that the reconstruction work took almost two decades (from 1996 until 2014).
Other parts of the tale are less obvious. An unassuming plaque on the side of the Sarajevo Museum (visitsarajevo.ba/museums) makes quiet mention that this is the assassination site; the National Museum (zemaljskimuzej.ba) pays scant attention to the murders. The city goes about its days without much care for 1914, eating dinner in the Bascarsija district, whose maze of shops and alleys still sings of the Ottoman era – and skiing on Jahorina in winter.
Only at the Vidovdan Heroes Chapel, a mile north of the river, is the link explicit. Here, in this small Serbian-Orthodox church, lie the remains of Gavrilo Princip (as well as of Nedeljko Čabrinović) – another dead young man in a city that has seen too many of them.
Getting there
Ryanair (01279 358 438; ryanair.com) flies to Sarajevo from London Stansted; Wizz Air (0330 977 0444; wizzair.com) serves the city directly from Luton.
Touring there
Regent (0117 453 7485; regent-holidays.co.uk) offers a five-day “Sarajevo Short Break” (which includes a day-trip to Mostar), from £810 per person, including flights.
Four other locations tied to the assassination
Traces of June 28 1914 can be found beyond Sarajevo…
The Museum of Military History (Austria)
Remarkably, Princip’s gun was handed to Anton Puntigam, the priest who – a close friend of the Archduke – gave the royal couple the last rites. It is now on display at the Museum of Military History in Vienna (hgm.at), where it shares its place in the collection with the black-painted Double Phaeton onto whose running-board the killer leapt to fire his shots.
Konopiště Castle (Czechia)
Somewhat macabrely, the bullets that killed the Archduke and his wife are both on show, at Konopiste Castle (zamek-konopiste.cz) – in the town of Benesov, 30 miles south-east of Prague, in what is now Czechia. As random as this sounds, there is a connection between the property and its grim artefacts – Konopiste was once owned by Franz Ferdinand, and was a favourite summer oasis. His and Sophie’s death masks are here too.
Terezin (Czechia)
Though his youthful age (just) saved him from execution, Gavrilo Princip did not live to see the end of the war he had unwittingly started. He was confined to a cell in the Small Fortress – in what was Theresienstadt, in Austro-Hungarian territory. Nowadays, this is Terezin, 40 miles north of Prague, in Czechia. And the fortress is a museum, having also served as a Gestapo prison in the Second World War (pamatnik-terezin.cz/small-fortress) – a relentlessly whirring cog in the death-maelstrom that was the Theresienstadt Ghetto.
Artstetten Castle (Austria)
The down-the-nose treatment of Sophie continued after her death. Her “lower” social status saw the couple denied burial in the Imperial Crypt of the Hapsburg dynasty, in central Vienna. Instead, she and the Archduke are entombed at Artstetten Castle, a pretty confection of a stately home, 60 miles west of the Austrian capital (schloss-artstetten.at).