Nikola’s description prompted me to rethink my understanding of what had once been a two-roomed home lived in by a family of five. This had been a European dwelling inhabited by an entire family at the start of the twentieth century, but it brought to my mind hovels that I routinely come across in rural Africa. The principle was exactly the same: a beaten-earth floor in a dwelling constructed out of stone walls, under a roof made of wood, thatch or branches gathered locally. A rate of child mortality that could kill six out of nine children from Princip’s family sounded more like Africa than Europe. The developed world might despair at modern Africa’s systemic problems, but standing in that garden in Obljaj taught me how recently much of Europe was in a similar position.
With the plot of land as his stage, Nikola began almost to act out this part of the family story. ‘Most of the time the family had a horse, a cow, a few chickens and sometimes some sheep. They were all kept down here.’ He was now peering inside the door of the underground chamber with the collapsed roof. ‘Gavro’s father used to earn money as a postman, delivering packages and letters around the area. His horse was important, so he would be well looked after in there, especially in the winter.’ Bosnian winters have a well-justified reputation for extreme conditions, so much so that in the novel Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh has Charles Ryder’s mother dying ‘of exhaustion in the snow in Bosnia’ while serving there as a nurse in wartime. From personal experience I knew how hazardous winters can be in Herzegovina. In 1994 I had made a good attempt to kill myself by sliding off an icy road in that wintry country, rolling my armoured Land Rover and knocking myself out.
Nikola then led me up the slope to where the living quarters had been. ‘Nana used to have a beautiful voice,’ he reminisced. ‘She sang in a choir, and all the time as she worked around the house. And she always wore traditional Serbian folk dress, with a little bag of sugar tucked away down here.’ He was now gesturing to his waistband. ‘She used to give it to her favourites. Sometimes she gave me some when I was a little child. She always said that she used to give sugar to Gavro because he was such a special boy.’
Special indeed was a boy who made it through childhood in these living conditions. The tuberculosis that would eventually kill Princip in 1918 was most likely contracted while being brought up in these stark conditions, although as a youngster he had been strong enough to suppress the disease. His only surviving older brother, Jovo, was seven years old when Gavrilo was born and there would be one more surviving child, a younger brother, Nikola, born three years after Gavrilo.
Gavrilo is remembered as having inherited his mother’s sharp chin, blue eyes and casual attitude towards religion, while from his more pious father, Petar, came his physique: short and wiry, as befits a farmer scratching out a hard-scrabble living in the highlands of Herzegovina. The most religious member of the family, Petar was known for never drinking, a noteworthy rarity in a community where the making and consuming of plum brandy, or šljivovica, was – and remains – a ritual enthusiastically embraced to ease the hardships of rural life. Petar clearly had something that marked him out within the community. He served for several years as the elected head of the zadruga, the association of local households. For generations across the Western Balkans the zadruga system was the foundation of rural life, a way of sharing earnings, dividing tax obligations and dealing with problems so as to help the maximum number of people. In his journalism Arthur Evans praised it lavishly for being fair and democratic, even communistic. The fact that Petar Princip had the vision to earn extra income as the village postman also suggested that he was more than just another peasant farmer. On official forms such as his school reports Gavrilo Princip would take care to describe his father not simply as an agricultural labourer, but as ‘an entrepreneur’.
Looking at Nikola as he wandered around the plot declaiming the family history, I convinced myself that I recognised his chin. It seemed to have the same sharpness as the one I had seen in the handful of surviving photographs of Princip. I felt I was looking at how the assassin would have appeared, had he reached old age.
Princip grew to take on the household tasks expected of a young boy in the village, tending the chickens, helping his mother around the homestead, working with his father in the fields and watching over the sheep. The rich local pastures of the Pasić plain, still named after an overlord from the feudal period, remained privately owned, but some of the barer hillsides higher up were common land and Princip would spend whole days up there minding the flock as it scrabbled among the rocks for nourishment. Mile said that wolves were an occasional hazard and a shepherd boy would be expected to use a stick or stones to protect his animals.
‘Nana used to say that Gavro might have been a quiet boy and a small boy, but he was tough,’ Nikola told me as we walked around the garden. ‘He learned up on the hills how to throw a stone like a bullet and, if anyone picked on him, all he had to do was throw one stone. It always hit the target. After that they would leave him alone.’ Nikola was chuckling now. ‘He kept himself to himself, but he always fought to defend those who could not defend themselves. There was a story that when a teacher at the primary school in the nearby town of Grahovo was punishing a boy in class by caning, Gavro hit the teacher over the head with a pencil case. He might have been small, but the village boys all knew he was ferocious if you tried to wrestle him.’ Nikola was now beaming with pride.
‘As he grew older he became more and more resentful of the foreign rulers here, the Austrians,’ he continued. ‘We were always told that he came back to the village for the winter before the assassination because he had got into a fight with an Austrian policeman. The gendarme had forced himself onto a girl, and Gavro beat him up. The cops were looking for him, so he came here. But that was his way. He took on the bullies.’
Primary school was as far as most children’s education reached in rural Bosnia under Austro-Hungarian rule at the start of the twentieth century. For Serbs it backstopped a significant, yet unofficial cultural education from within their own community, one that proudly passed on ethnic identity through the sharing of folk stories and epic poetry about the heroes of ancient, pre-Ottoman Serbia. Mile sought to rekindle that same spirit when he offered to read some of his own verse written in honour of his famous ancestor. His relatives nodded approvingly, and both Arnie and I were keen to listen to him and so, in a deep baritone, Mile recited a work he had entitled ‘The Hand of Gavrilo’. Laden with references to blood, bones and death, his performance briefly transported me from the verandah of the Princip family home in the summer of 2012 to the zadruga age a hundred years earlier, when members of all Serb households would formally gather to polish myths from an era long gone.
As he grew up, Princip would attend such gatherings in his own home, where on occasion he was encouraged to use the skills acquired at primary school by reading to the assembled group from Serbian history books. With illiteracy commonplace among the feudal peasantry, a recital by a young reader must have been quite an event. I could picture his parents standing tall with pride. In winter time, when temperatures in these high villages plummet so dramatically, the meetings would have been crowded, smoky and, no doubt, malodorous affairs. According to a passage attributed to the young Princip by a contemporary, Dobroslav Jevdjević, he found the gatherings disturbing, as if they served to encapsulate the inward-looking, forlorn reality of a people browbeaten by poverty:
The wet logs on the open fire gave the only light to the closely packed serfs and their wives, wrapped in thick smoke. If I tried to penetrate the curtain of smoke, the most I could see were the eyes of human beings, numerous, sad and glaring with some kind of fluid light coming from nowhere. Some kind of reproach, even threat, radiated from them, and many times since then they have awakened me from my dreams.
To escape peasant life under Austro-Hungarian rule would not have been easy. But the same spirit that drove Petar Princip to be an entrepreneurial postman had passed to all his sons.
&n
bsp; Gavrilo’s older brother, Jovo, was the one who made the break first. Being not as bookish as Gavrilo, it was money that drove Jovo to leave Obljaj in search of a living. After drifting through various menial jobs he ended up near Sarajevo working in the timber industry, which was booming at the time, with demand for wood coming from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He settled in Hadžići, a village outside the city at the foot of the thickly forested slopes of Mount Igman, where he earned enough to set himself up with a pair of horses to drag felled trunks down to his own modest sawmill. Jovo had been working there some years when he saw a notice in a local newspaper offering places at secondary schools in Sarajevo for suitable candidates. He sent word back to Obljaj.
‘Gavro loved his books,’ said Mile after we had joined the others once more on the verandah. ‘From the time he went to primary school just up the road in Grahovo he read and read and read. He always had his head in a book. Nana used to get cross with him sometimes because he could forget about the sheep and the other chores. But then it was Nana who wanted the best for her special son, and she was the one who said he must leave and go to school in Sarajevo. His father was not so keen, but Nana was able to persuade him.’
Up to this point the orbit of Princip’s life had been tight. He had never left the immediate area of the valley, rarely strayed further than Grahovo, which is just two miles away, and scarcely had any contact with Bosnians who were not ethnic Serbs. The stories he heard would have centred on Serbian legends, and after the divide-and-rule of imperial control the other local communities of Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims were a relative unknown. Under occupation first by the Ottomans and more recently the Austro-Hungarians, the different rural communities kept themselves mostly to themselves, and while there were Bosnian Croats living in and around Grahovo, before Princip left to further his education he had never met a single Bosnian Muslim.
Listening to Mile, I too found it extraordinary that a boy with a childhood of such limited horizons could go on to precipitate events that would change the world. Where did his revolutionary zeal come from, his hatred of the Austro-Hungarians, his anger at the indignity heaped on his people throughout history? And were his interests purely Serb, as some observers have claimed, or was he acting on behalf of all south Slavs? If so, where did this wider interest come from, for a boy brought up within only one of the Slav ethnic groups? With Arnie’s help, I asked the family what they thought had happened to Princip once he left Obljaj, but from this point on the story dried up. Miljkan shook his head and looked at the ground. Nikola fell silent, glancing at me repeatedly from the corner of his eye. They told me they did not know. Instead they preferred to keep alive the image of the tough little farm boy who had a thing about reading and helping the weak, not the person described by some for his later actions as a ruthless assassin.
‘He left as a little boy in 1907 and something happened that changed him,’ Mile said. ‘During the long holidays from school he would sometimes come back here. It was on one of these visits in 1909 that he left his initials on the rock at the back of the garden. We were always told that while he was leaving his mark on the stone, a friend of his called Špiro Marić asked him why he was doing it. He said it was because “one day people will know my name”.’
For the first time since we arrived, Miljkan’s elderly wife, Mika, now ventured out onto the verandah, mumbling to her husband and handing him a piece of paper, before slipping back to the safety of the doorjamb. Her steps made no sound in her thick, knitted woollen socks, traditionally worn all year round in rural Bosnian homes as house-slippers. Nikola glanced at the sheet, a black-and-white photocopy of a page from a book. It showed a picture of Princip’s coffin as it was prepared for burial in Sarajevo. Nikola’s eyes flared and he flicked the paper with his hand.
‘There you are.’ There was clear anger in his voice. ‘They say he was a terrorist, they say all these bad things about him. But look at this. He was buried a boy. He was only nineteen when they sent him to die in jail. All I know is that he always stood up to fight for those not strong enough to fight for themselves, he stood up to fight against injustice.’
It was a noble thought for the descendants of Princip to cling to. The assassination of the Archduke had ill-served the family, bringing them no fortune and making their home a target over the years. Austro-Hungarian police rounded up Princip’s parents days after the shooting on 28 June 1914 and jailed them without charge. Even though the First World War ended in defeat for the Austro-Hungarians and the founding of Yugoslavia – a country where south Slavs could run their own affairs – the new government was slow to recognise Princip’s family. Petar and Marija lived out the rest of their lives in the same poverty they had always known under foreign occupation. After being destroyed in the Second World War, the family house was rebuilt as a national monument under the communist rule of Tito and opened to the public in 1964. It lasted until 1995, when Croat troops destroyed it for being too closely associated with their Serb enemies. I began to understand why Mile described living in Obljaj as both ‘his curse and his duty’.
To understand better the change Princip underwent when he left Obljaj, I would cross the mountains as he did and head towards Sarajevo. It was through this overland journey that the young boy’s horizons shifted as he was fully exposed for the first time to the other component parts of Bosnia’s ethnic mix. With my de-mining map showing the presence of many minefields on the slopes of our first major obstacle, Tent Mountain, I asked Mile what he thought about the scale of the threat. He told us there were definitely some mines on the mountain, but he would be willing to guide us up the foothills in the morning and start us off safely on our way. I was delighted. To persuade Arnie to come on the trip I had promised that we would only proceed with local guides, and I could think of no better guide in Obljaj than someone whose full name was Gavrilo Mile Princip.
Then Mile made me even happier by saying we could camp for the night in front of the ruins of Princip’s old house. Team morale soared as Arnie and I unpacked our gear and erected our tents side-by-side on the wiry grass. It was a clear summer night, the stars blurry through the gauze of my mosquito net, the village of Obljaj noiseless, dark and at ease. For some time I lay on my sleeping bag, thrilled at this unexpected start to my journey: discovering graffiti left by Princip himself, finding the last surviving Princip family members, exploring his birthplace with people of his bloodline. With dew forcing me under the covers, I fell asleep with the family history churning through my mind – the story of generations of Princips who had lived out centuries in this remote, rough rural place and of the teenage outlier who had left to change the world.
CHAPTER 4
Over Tent Mountain
Arnie beginning the ascent of Mount Šator
Arnie passing a minefield warning sign, west of Kupres
The crowing of Obljaj’s cockerels woke me at dawn and the next sound I heard was that of Mile snuffling in the half-light outside his house, heaving on stout walking boots and calf-length socks beneath long hiking shorts. His bustling roused Arnie and me out of our sleeping bags, but just to make sure we really were taking down our tents, Mile walked across to offer us Bosnian coffee served in handleless containers as small and fragile as eggcups. I suspected that a family member had been sent out overnight to beg beans from a neighbour.
‘It’s a long way to Mount Šator, so we want to get started as soon as possible,’ Mile urged. ‘It does not look like there is going to be much cloud in the sky, but if we are lucky we will get to the cover of the trees before the sun becomes too strong.’ I smiled in recognition. The Forest of Šator was significant enough to earn several mentions in the journalism of Evans from the 1870s when he toured rebel positions during the Bosnian uprising. With Mile’s permission, I stepped into the house to use the bathroom. The other family members had not yet stirred, but the downstairs had the same yeasty, warm aroma I recalled from farmhouses I stayed in almost twenty years ago. It spoke of
cheap soap and honest elbow-grease.
‘We need to get going.’ Mile was beginning to sound a little cross. ‘Your journey only starts now.’ I thought of a line from Rebecca West’s travelogue from Yugoslavia. She spent time on the Adriatic coast, exploring various offshore islands, but she wrote that it was only when she reached this area, Herzegovina, that ‘the really adventurous part of our journey began’.
Cramming biscuits into our mouths as breakfast, Arnie and I loaded our rucksacks onto our backs and made to walk back down to the road that followed the valley floor. But Mile had chosen a more direct route, striding up the sloped garden and barging through the hedge on top of the dry-stone wall that bears Gavrilo Princip’s graffiti. ‘Come on, my friends. We’ve got work to do,’ he said, disappearing from view.
After wrestling through the bushes at the top of the garden I found myself looking up at a steep heath, a vast rug of coarse upland grass reaching far and away to the horizon, seemingly held down by grey rocks scattered everywhere. We were heading towards a rising sun still low enough in the sky to make glowing lanterns out of seed-heavy heads among the long grass stems. As we contoured steadily up and across the slope, the rouge from the tiled rooftops of Obljaj eased itself into our wake, soon followed by that from the hamlet where Princip’s mother had been courted by his father in the 1880s. As I got used to the weight on my back and settled on a comfortable rhythm for my stride, the only sound I could hear over my breathing was the distant bleating from a flock of sheep minded by a shepherd on the lower flanks down by the flat valley floor. Mile and Arnie were discussing the livestock when I caught up with them at the first break.