Our Bosnia: Bosnia Becomes Ours—Until It Hurts

Summary

Objectivity, in Bosnia, could not be neutrality, and the head, in Bosnia, meant nothing without the heart.

—Roger Cohen

I’m reading Roger Cohen's book, Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo, in Graz, Austria, in the old Uhrturm, or clock tower, the view from which stretches as far as the borders with Hungary and Slovenia. Below at 18 Sackstrasse stands a building that used to be called Conrad's House, and in which, on March 13, 1863, the heir to the Habsburg throne, Franz Ferdinand, came into the world. Today it houses a museum that exhibits photographs from the Archduke's life. June 28, 1914—a murder in Sarajevo. The crowd takes away the captured Serb, Gavrilo Princip. The next day, the bodies of Franz Ferdinand and his wife are laid out in open coffins in a Sarajevo funeral chapel. Then begins their trek through Central Europe. They float down the Neretva River through Mostar to the Adriatic; they sail up to Trieste, then travel along the Dunaj, to the castle in Artstetten and Vienna. Crowds of mourners are everywhere. Emperor Franz Joseph is captured in a horse-drawn carriage making for the funeral—aged, impotent. Meanwhile turmoil in Sarajevo. The Muslims are the most visible in the anti-Serbian demonstration. Photographs from the trial of “Young Bosnia,” the organization to which Princip and Nedeljko Čabranović, the fellow who planted the bomb, belonged—in their eyes, a mission, obstinate faces, a legible readiness to fight and die. The inscription carved on Kosovo Field appears to showthrough the faces of these youths: “Whoever is a Serb or of Serbian origin and does not come to fight at Kosovo, may he never have children, son or daughter. May everything he grows turn barren. May he have neither wine nor wheat. May all turn to dust until he dies.”

Throughout the years that Yugoslavia existed, a plaque hung by the Gavrilo Princip Bridge commemorating his act, considered heroic here. Today, the young Serbian nationalist is no longer a hero of Sarajevo, and in place of the plaque is an empty gap. “History here will not be left in peace,” writes Cohen. The day the Archduke was murdered, the day the embers were lit under the First World War, is the day the anniversary of the battle at Kosovo Field is commemorated.