Franz Ferdinand’s three deaths

In the previous post about Sarajevo’s syagogues, a cuckoo’s egg slipped in about the Yugoslav memorial plaque of Gavrilo Princip, unscrewed from the wall by the German army marching into the city in April 1941, and sent to Hitler for his birthday. Now the cuckoo hatches from the egg and spreads its wings.

In fact, the removal of the plaque was considered so important by the German official newsreel Deutsche Wochenschau, that they dedicated an entire half minute to it out of the twenty-four-minute broadcast of the truly glamorous events of the week. By clicking on it, the video starts right at 11:38, at the beginning of the scene.


“In Sarajewo. Hier wurde am 28en Juni 1914 der österreichische Tronfolger Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand durch das feige Attentat eines serbischen Studenten niedergestreckt. Diese Schüsse waren das Signal zum Weltkrieg. – Die Marmortafel, die diesem Ort von Volksdeutschen entfernt, und dem deutschem Wehrmacht übergeben. Sie trägt die Inschrift: »An dieser historischen Stätte erkämpfte Gavrilo Princip Serbien die Freiheit.« Der Führer überwiest die Tafel der Berliner Zeughaus.”

“Sarajevo. On June 28, 1914, the infamous terror attack of a Serbian student killed Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand. This gunshot gave the signal to the Great War. – This marble plaque was removed by the Volksdeutsche and handed over to the German army. Its inscription: «In this historic place, Gavrilo Princip achieved freedom for Serbia.» The Führer forwarded the plaque to the Zeughaus in Berlin.”

The newsreel emphasizes that the plaque was removed not by the army, but by the Volksdeutsche, the local ethnic Germans, and it was they who then handed it to the army. However, the spontaneity of the dozen of young people, dressed in flawless white shirts and ties, and performing a well-choreographed little march, is quite questionable. Not to mention that the field musicians and officers of the Wehrmacht are assisting in this action, obviously just as spontaneously. And if we also know that the pictures were taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, who then immediately boarded Hitler’s private train Sonderzug Amerika, especially sent for the plaque, to photograph the next day the Führer, celebrating his fifty-second birthday in Mönichkirchen, as he is intensely looking at the plaque, then it will be clear that it was a well-planned and prepared symbolic event.


Hitler is also beholding extremely spontaneously the plaque surrounded by two and half zombies. We know that only Hoffmann was allowed to take photos of him, and only while posing, in poses worthy of a great statesman. These poses were borrowed from the topos repository created by classical and romantic painting and sculpture, which also offer us a clue to understanding them. The one we see here is “the great general contemplating the ruins of Rome” pose. Which also suggests that this plaque meant more to him than merely spoils of war from an unnatural state created by Versailles.

Hitler agreed with Franz Ferdinand’s removal from the throne, even though he condemned the assassins. The Slavic-friendly crown prince, who had a Czech consort, meant to him and to his associates the danger of a compromise with the Slavs and the diminution of the weight of the German element. It is no wonder that he celebrated with relief on Munich’s Odeonplatz the war that settles accounts with Serbia and Russia threatening the German Lebensraum. By accident, this moment was photographed by Hoffmann, who, twenty years later, found the future Führer it in, at his request. No matter whether the figure is really the young Adolf, or, as some say, some retouching by Hoffmann was also necessary to make the identification. The point is that Hitler wanted be in that picture, he wanted to be at the starting point of the glorious German Sturm. It was the zero point of the Sarajevo pistol shot that launched him and the German people on the right track, and now that this track – despite the humiliation of Versailles and through its obliteration – would soon reach its zenith with the overcoming of Russia, the Führer looks back at this starting point when contemplating the Princip plaque.


In 1930 the Yugoslav state, by placing a plaque on the spot of the Princip attempt – albeit setting it as a private initiative – with the inscription “На овом историјском мјесту Гаврило Принцип навијести слободу на Видов-дан 15. јуна 1914” – “From this historical place Gavrilo Princip brought us freedom on St. Vitus’ Day, 15 June 1914” (that is, on the 28th of the Gregorian calendar), managed to achieve the outbreaks of not only its former World War enemies, but also of its own allies. That Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung calls it a “monstrous and intolerable provocation”, is just natural from the German side. But also London Times wrote, that the plaque immortalizes “an act which was the immediate cause of the Great War, of its attendant horrors, and of the general suffering which has been its sequel”. Churchill, in his contemporary The Unknown War calls it the monument of infamy, which, erected by Princip’s fellow countrymen, “records his infamy and their own”. And according to the contemporary British historian Robert William Seton-Watson, the plaque “was an affront to all right-thinking people”.

The Sarajevo Volksdeutsche handing the Princip plaque to the German Army

However, we cannot understand the real cause of the establishing of the plaque if we do not know the myth that it fits within. The clue is offered by the seemingly unnecessary archaism of Vidovdan, St. Vitus’ day, in the text. On this day, 15 June 1318, the whole Serb nation, led by Prince Lazar, was martyred on the plane of Kosovo, confronting the Ottoman army to the last warrior. This is the zero point of Serbian history. One has to get back here, and here one has to restart history, which at that point took a regrettably wrong turn. This is the so-called Kosovo Myth, which was coined by 19th-c. Serbian romanticism, and to which we can lead back all the 20th-century Balkan wars that started from Belgrade. To kill a tyrant on St. Vitus’ Day is an archetypal act, as was done by the legendary Serbian warrior Miloš Obilić, who struck the Sultan after his victory. And vice versa: if a Serbian warrior kills someone on Vidovdan, it symbolically attests that he was a tyrant. Princip’s Vidovdan bullet in one moment produced the archetypal constellation required by the Serbian military leadership to represent the fight for the re-devision of the Balkans as a sacred national war. From then on, the struggle for Bosnia was not just a dog-fight over the territories left by the Turks, but a necessary historical act leading to the correction of national history, which had taken a wrong turn in 1389. This zero point and this myth was faced with the myth and zero point of the Führer contemplating it in the railway wagon in Mönchkirchen.

Princip and his fellow conspirators as Vinovdan heroes. Below: The “chapel of the Vinovdan hroes”, erected upon Princip’s ashes, in Sarajevo’s old Orthodox cemetery

The plaque was then moved to the Zeughaus in Berlin, which was then a military museum called Arsenal. Here, a huge exhibition of the symbolic booty was organized, with Princip’s plaque in the middle. They also brought here the French rail car, in which in 1918 the German capitulation was signed, thus washing away the shame of Versailles. The building is today Deutsches Historisches Museum, where similar objects still often pop up, now of course as exhibition objects. Like the Zagreb bronze plaque, which attempted to give a new consciousness to the young South Slavic state by stamping the Hungarian coat of arm under its figures’ feet.

The Gravrilo Princip plaque on the booty exhibition in the Zeughaus

During the siege of Berlin, the plaque was destroyed together with the German myth. In Sarajevo, the Yugoslav partisans replaced it on 7 May 1945, a day before the German capitulation, with this inscription: “With eternal thanks to Gavrilo Princip and his comrades fighting against the German invasion.” For now, the Serbian myth gained the upper hand, in a new, popular tuning. In 1953, when the building was converted into a museum of the Young Bosnia movement, which had organized the assassination, a new plaque was set up with a new text: “On June 28, 1914, from this place Gavrilo Princip expressed with his pistol shot the people’s protest and centuries-old aspirations for freedom.” This plaque disappeared between 1992 and 1996, when the people of Sarajevo also expressed with machine gun shots from this place their aspirations for freedom and protest against the tyranny of Serbian nationalism, keeping the city under a bloody siege. Today it only says in Bosnian and English: “From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia.”

On 28 June 2014, when this  plaque was inaugurated, another monument was also solemnly set up in Sarajevo. The small square is located at the westernmost end of Sarajevo, which is nevertheless called East Sarajevo. This is the part of the town where the Serbs moved out during the siege, and where, after the war, new housing estates were built for them from international aid. There are no physical boundaries between the two parts of the city, yet there is virtually no contact and no public transport between them. Here, a new, heroic statue of Gavrilo Princip was set up, and at the same time one of the first public spaces of the new district in formation was also named Gavrilo Princip Park. The myth lives on.

The new Princip monument in Google Street View, and its inauguration at the centenary

However, the first souvenirs of the assassination were much earlier than the 1930 memorial plaque. Already a hundred years ago, the local paper shops entered into the service of catastrophe tourism, and immediately started publishing picture postcards, which do not merely represent the Latin Bridge and its environs as a city view, but rather as the scene of the assassination, sometimes marking the exact spot with a small cross.

The souvenir postcards were usually provided with the Franz Ferdinand memorial stamps, which represented, besides the princely consorts, the Sarajevo Basilica, planned but never realized in their memory (see below).

And in 1917, on the third anniversary of the attempt, the first plaque appeared on the spot, marking the location for all subsequent plaques. This plaque was set up by the Austro-Hungarian government on Moritz Schiller’s deli, from which Princip stepped out to shoot the crown prince. The only Bosnian-language plaque with cross and imperial crown said: “In this place, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his consort, Duchess Sophie Hohenberg suffered a martyr’s death at an assassin’s hand.”

The plaque in front view, and seen from the quay and from Franz Josef street.
Last photo: the scaffolding used to affix the plaque.

Already in 1916, the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina announced a competition for a grand martyr’s monument of the princely couple. It had a Hungarian winner, the excellent Art Nouveau sculptor and architect Jenő Bory (1879-1959), later rector of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, who in January 1915 was commissioned to Sarajevo as a military engineer. Here Pater Puntigam, the director of the archbishop’s seminary, and the chief promoter of the Archduke’s cult, showed him the Archduke’s bloody shirt, and introduced him to the conception of the story which was to be visualized in the memorial.

Since there was no room for a monument in the narrow Franz Josef Street, only a 2×1-meter cast steel plate was sunk into the pavement, with the Latin inscription: “Hoc loco die 28. Junie 1914. vitam et sanquinem fuderunt pro Deo et patria Franciscus Ferdinandus archidux eiusque uxor ducissa Sophia de Hohenberg.” (“In this place Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie Hohenberg gave their lives and blood for God and the homeland.”) Probably this sunken panel gave the idea of that much later, post-1953 monument, which sank the assassin’s footprints into the pavement of the walkway.

No legible photo of the sunken panel has survived, and different sources remember slightly different texts. This one is from Belgischer Kurier, a local version of Deutsche Kurier published in occupied Belgium.

The actual monument was set up on the opposite side of the quay, at the head of the Latin Bridge opposite the house. Two tall columns held the bronze relief of the princely couple, with a small Pietà statue and an eternal flame under it. For the sake of symmetry, a semicircular marble bench was also built at the other bridgehead, where it was possible to meditate on the historical scene.

The memorial column with the relief, and with different mourning groups

The model of Jenő Bory’s relief. Tolnai Világlapja, Aug. 10, 1916

The three units of the monument at inauguration

And this was just the beginning. Pater Puntigam began collecting more tribute to erect even larger memorial buildings to the princely couple: a huge Neo-Romanesque church in memory of Franz Ferdinand, and a youth home named for Duchess Sophie. Both were designed by Jenő Bory. The first three million golden crowns were collected, and Bory was already involved in the execution, when the Monarchy was forced to armistice, and then to retire from Sarajevo. The church was never realized. However, Jenő Bory recalled to have been inspired by it for his own home and studio in Székesfehérvár, the famous Bory Castle. The Serbian troops marching in Sarajevo removed both memorial plaques and the monument. Only the arched bench remained in the site, as an apparently innocent abbreviation of the story, which, however, spoke volumes to the initiates.

The model of the Franz Ferdinand memorial church, and a summary of Jenő Bory’s other monumental designs in Sarajevo. Új Idők, 1916/2, 21-22.

But the story is not over yet. It turned out that the original bronze relief of the monument also survived the stormy century in the cellar of the museum. In 2001, it was proposed in the City Council to restore the columns, and set it up in its original location. For the time being, they erected a plexi plate at the memorial site, with a small drawing of the original sculpture, and a historical explanation.



All this fits well with the new conception of Bosnian history outlined in recent decades, the three pillars of which are the independent medieval Bosnian kingdom, the rich culture and tolerance of Ottoman Sarajevo, and the Austro-Hungarian era of economic and intellectual revival. The public buildings and achievements of Austrian times are emphasized throughout the city. The former Young Bosnia Museum has been converted into a museum presenting the Austro-Hungarian Golden Age in Bosnia. At the centenary ceremony in Sarajevo, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra played Haydn’s Imperial Hymn. The epoch of Austria Felix has become a new zero point for Bosnian history. The monument of the assassination stood in the service of a new myth.

Sarajevo's synagogues

If you ask in Sarajevo, where the synagogue is, everyone will surely direct you to the beautiful, large, four-towered, Moorish-style building, built in 1902 for the Ashkenazi community arriving in a large number from the Monarchy, by Karel Pařík, the Czech master who designed the seventy most important buildings of Austro-Hungarian Bosnia. The reason is that, since the end of WWII, this is the only active synagogue in Bosnia, where the three thousand – now only seven hundred – Jews who returned from the death camps, pray in Bosnian, regardless of their origin and mother tongue. But also because the other former Jewish prayer houses are called in Sarajevo’s tongue not synagogue, but kal – kahal, religious community –, borrowed from Sephardic/Ladino. In fact, the Jews of Sarajevo spoke in this language for four hundred years.

This postcard was written by Gizus to her friend in the Hungarian Zalaegerszeg in 1904, showing how great the Austro-Hungarian traffic was in Sarajevo until the pistol shot. The sender of the second postcard, Alois Adamtschek, however, was hardly in the picture, sending a Christmas greeting with the image of the synagogue.

In July 1492, when the Spanish rulers expelled the Jews from their country, Sultan Bayazit II immediately sent for them the Turkish fleet, led by Kemal Reis – the uncle and preceptor of the great cartographer Piri Reis – to carry them over to the provinces of the Ottoman Empire. “They call Ferdinand wise, although he made his country poor, and mine rich!”, he allegedly said to his courtiers. And he sent fermans to the governors of his provinces, commanding the acceptance and benevolent support of the refugees. This is how the Jews came also to Sarajevo, where they really enjoyed a benevolent acceptance. Janissary agha Siyavush, the Bosnian governor and later Grand Vizier, who was born in a Hungarian family in Nagykanizsa, built a special quarter for them on the edge of the bazaar. This was the Great Courtyard, in Sephardic Il Kortizo, in Turkish Čifuthana, that is, the Jewish Caravanserai, where sixty Jewish families lived and traded, and where they built their first synagogue, Il Kal Vježu, the Old Kahal.

The Sarajevo Haggadah, composed in 1315 in Barcelona, the greatest treasure of the Jews of Sarajevo

The settlement of Sephardic Jews is traditionally dated back to 1565, though they apparently arrived in several vawes and from several places along the major trade routes passing through Sarajevo, from Saloniki, Istanbul, and Ragusa/Dubrovnik. The Kal Vježu was built not much later, in 1581, and despite the great fires and the Nazi destruction, it still stands in its orignal form. It is a large three-nave sanctuary, with women’s galleries in the two side naves. The Sephardic synagogues, unlike the Ashkenazi ones, look southwards, the heklah, the Torah ark is in their southern apsis. The synagogue, which today serves as the Jewish museum of Sarajevo, is surrounded by a high wall: this much remains from the original Kortizo.


There are also other Hungarian threads in the Jewish history of Sarajevo. In 1686, following the Christian takeover of Buda – described from Jewish perspective by Isaac Schulhof in his Chronicle of Buda – several Sephardic Jews of Buda arrived with the retreating Ottoman army. Among them was Cevi Hirsh, whose family – just like that of Isaac Schulhof – perished in the siege of Buda. He was Sarajevo’s second rabbi known by name – the first one was Samuel Baruh (1623-1640), who rests under the earliest dated grave of the Jewish cemetery in Kovačić district (about which we will write in a later post) –, and for a century his offspring occupied this position. His son Haham Ishak Cevi started the Pinakes, the detailed chronicle of the Sarajevo Jews. It was lost in 1941, but the last great rabbi, Moritz Levy (1917-1941) took over a lot from it in his 1912 monograph Die Sephardim in Bosnien.

Sephardic (“Spaniolisches”) girl from Sarajevo in an early 20th-c. postcard

The building of the second synagogue, the Kal Nuevo, standing next to the old one, is associated with the name of the most revered rabbi of Sarajevo, Mojsije Moshe Danon (1815-1830). This one has perhaps the most amazing story. It happened that a Travnik Jew, Moshe Havijo converted to Islam, joined the local dervishes, practised prophecy and miraculous healing, and did not stop reviling his former co-religionists. Then in 1820 he suddenly disappeared. The Bosnian governor, Ruzhdi Bey supected the Travnik Jews of having killed him, but since they were few, and he could not crush much money out of them, the held responsible the Sarajevo Jews. He arrested the rabbi and ten superiors of the synagogue, and once they were at hand, also some wealthy Christians, and required a ransom of five hundred thousand silver groschens within two days, otherwise they would be hanged.

Since the community could collect only six thousand groschens in two days, the last night moneylender Ruben Levi turned to the Muslim superiors of Sarajevo to soften the heart of he pasha. They tried it, but it was useless. Next morning, however, in the twilight after the first prayer, three thousand Muslim men surrounded the pasha’s palace, Begluk. The guards were disarmed, the hostages freed, and the escape of the pasha was a close shave. The kahal decided to spend the collected money on the building of a second synagogue. The Kal Nuevo was erected in 1821. It is still owned by the Jewish community, which uses it for gallery of temporal exhibitions.

An anecdote of Sarajevo begs to be told at this point. A Bosnian delegation was asked in the court of Istanbul, who their best governor was. They replied: the one who left Istanbul, but never arrived at Sarajevo.

To the left the old, to the right the “new” Kal

But the story continues. Ten years later, Rabbi Moshe convoked the former hostages, Jews and Christians alike, and he announced that, according to the custom of the rabbis of Sarajevo, he would go to Jerusalem for pilgrimage, to be buried in the holy ground. However, he predicted that he would never arrive to the holy city, and also that each of those present would have a son within a year. He entrusted them with the care of his grave. While traveling towards Ragusa/Dubrovnik, he stopped in Stolać. There he had a bath, put on clean clothes, and died while praying in the coffee house. His grave is still a place of pilgrimage for Bosnian Jews, who gather around it and say kaddish on 20 June, his jarzeit.

Tomb of Mojsije Moshe Danon outside Stolać’s borders. Below: Sarajevo pilgrims at the tomb before the war

It is a strange coincidence, that Stolać is also an important center of medieval Bosnian carved tombstones, stećaks (stećci), and the rabbi’s tombstone was carved in a similar shape. The entire monumental complex of the village was proposed on the World Heritage List. And here was born the greatest 20th-century Bosnian poet, Mak Dizdar (1917-1971), whose beautiful poems were inspired by these carvings and their inscriptions. We will write about it later.

“Bogumil gravestone”, as stećci were called in the Romantic era, in the Trebović mountain above Sarajevo. Below: stećci in the necropolis next to Moshe Danon’s grave.

The good relationship between Jews and Muslims is also documented by another fact. It seems that the Jewish community did not have their own mikve, but used the Turkish baths of the nearby mosques for ritual cleansing. From 1767 on, the books of accounts regularly report that the hammams of the two largest mosque complexes, of Isha Bey and Ghazi Husref Bey, were hired for ritual bathing before weddings.

Sephardic women from Sarajevo on early 20th-century postcard

As the district south of the two Kals was the area of the bazaar and of the Muslim population, the natural direction of the 19th-century outbreak of the Sephardic Jews was north. They built their elegant eclectic and Art Nouveau buildings on the two sides of the road leading from the bazaar to Ragusa/Dubrovnik, called first Shalom Albahari, later Čemalusa, and now Tito street. Before the war, there were six hundred Jewish-owned shops along the long street. At the beginning of the street, where the northern highway going round the bazaar and Ferhadija, the bazaar’s main street meet, a Hungarian Jewish entrepreneur, Daniel A. Salom built an elegant cornerhouse in 1893, the Grand Hotel, which was also designed by Karel Pařík. Next to it was built in the late 19th century the prayer house called Kal di Kapon after its founder, the highly educated Avraham A. Kapon, community treasurer, writer and publisher. It was also called Kal de Đajen after its best-known director, Sebatej Đajen, and also Kal de lus mudus, the prayer house of the mutes, for it used chorus at the service, during which the believers prayed in silence. The synagogue is today a residential house. The tradition of the chorus is continued by the choir of the Ashkenazi synagogue, which also performs Sephardic rite and Sephardic secular songs on a regular basis.

The Čemalusa and the Grand Hotel in 1917. In that year, the Grand Hotel is already Landesbank (who goes to visit Sarajevo during the war?) and the street also bears the name of Franz Ferdinand. Not for long.

Sarajevo’s synagogues. Click on the red dots

The hilltop north of Čemalusa, Mejtaš with its winding streets was also considered a Jewish district. In the middle of the quarter, on Mejtaš Street was built the Mejtaš prayer house, which is also a residential house today, but its first-floor medallions with the menorahs and stars of David bear witness to its original function. Its founder, Avram Papo came from one of the most prominent Sephardic families, which also boasted with the pharmacists of the city – the equipment of their pharmacy is today in the Jewish museum – and with Laura Papo Bohoreta (1891-1942), the first Sephardic female writer and first feminist in the Balkans. We will later report about her book La mujer sefardí de Bosna (The Sephardic woman of Bosnia).

The Mejtaš prayer house today

The Papo pharmacy in the bazaar

The last and largest synagogue of the city was so short-lived, that it was completely erased from the memory of Sarajevo. It is not even mentioned in most Jewish sites, and you can find material on it on the postcard auction sites. The huge Sephardic synagogue, the largest one in the Balkans, was erected between 1926 and 1930 as a counterpart of the Ashkenazi synagogue on the opposite river bank, in the Art Nouveau neighborhood. Its builder, Rudolf Lubinski of Zagreb, himself a Jew, was one of the greatest Croatian Art Nouveau artists. The Kal Grande was therefore built in the same Art Nouveau style as the Ashkenazi one, but also with many Art Deco details, with a large elliptic dome, and with an entrance courtyard imitating Alhambra. Its apsis, according to the Sephardic tradition, looked toward south, the river, while its entrance was from the north.

The synagogue, designed for two thousand believers, stood only ten years. The Ustashas entering the town in April 1941, while their Nazi hosts unscrewed the Yugoslav Gavrilo Princip memorial plaque on the site of Franz Ferdinand’s assassionation, and sent it to the former Austro-Hungarian corporal Hitler for his birthday, systematically destroyed the synagogue’s equipment, and annihilated the archives of the four-hundred-year old community. The three thousand Jews coming back from the twelve thousand strong pre-war community (20% of Sarajevo’s pre-war population) agreed to use the Ashkenazi synagogue, and donated the Kal Grande to the city. It was restored in 1965. Until the change of the regime, it hosted the Đuro Đjakovic Workers’ University, and today is the house of Bosnian culture. In its lounge, a huge marble menorah recalls the 400th anniversary of the settlement of the Jews in Sarajevo.

Hitler watching the Gavrilo Princip memorial plaque sent for his birthday on 20 April 1941, in the Illustrierter Beobachter

Locals pillaging the Kal Grande after the destruction of the Ustashas

The pillaged Kal Grande

We will return several times to the history and memories of the Sarajevo Jews. Now we say good-bye to it with the Sephardic song, well-known also in Bosnia, which gave the title to Vesna Ljubić’s 2001 film on the Jews of Sarajevo. It is still often performed here, like by Barimatango in Mostar, or Bojana Marković’s Flamenco band. The following version comes from the neighborhood, the Macedonian Baklava ensemble, from the film The Third Half (Treto poluvreme, 2013) about the tribulations of Sephardic Jews during the war. You can also watch/listen to it together with the film’s trailer.


Adio kerida (Good-bye, my darling). Performed by Baklava Ensemble.

adio, adio kerida no kero la vida me l’amargates tú tu madre kuan te parió y te kitó al mundo korasón eya no te dió para amar segundo va buškate otro amor aharva otras puertas aspera otra pasión ke para mi sos muerta

good bye, my darling, I don’t want my life poisoned by you your mother, when she gave birth to you, and brought you to the world, did not give you a heart to love anyone else but yourself go, look for another lover knock on other doors hope another passion, for you are dead to me

Tombstone in the Jewish cemetery of Kovačić district