A brewery on the Skadarlija

The Skadarlija, Belgrade’s bohemian street, descends from the old town to the suburbs. Its lower end at the market is marked by an Ottoman-style fountain, a copy of the Sebilj at the Sarajevo market, while at the upper end, there is a memorial column, whose long text lists the great kafanas – cafés, music pubs – that worked in the street in the past century, as well as the great poets, painters, musicians and other literati that made the kafanas famous in Belgrade and across the country.


Some nearby pubs were made famous by other kinds of people. Near the upper part of the Skadarlija stood the kafana Kod Albanije, founded in 1860, where the assassins of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo wove their plans in 1914. Since we have already dedicated a special picture post to their oeuvre in Sarajevo, let us have a picture of its Belgrade bridgehead as well. In 1939 it was replaced by the Palata Albanija.


In the early 19th century, after the removal of the ramparts of the fortress of Belgrade, Gypsies settled here, along the Bibijin stream running down between the ramparts, which also determined the trail of the Skadarlija. The Gypsy quarter, like the Albaicín in Granada, Rixdorf in Berlin or Tabán in Budapest, soon became a bohemian residential area, and later a suburban party neighborhood, far from the iron fist of urban regulation. Its development was facilitated by the large brewery built in 1892 by the Czech Bajloni company in the lower part of the street, which constantly supplied the kafanas with fresh Aleksandar beer.


In 1945, the brewery was merged in the all-encompassing state-owned BiH brewery chain, which went bankrupt in the early 2000s. The huge block of the factory was recently converted for new purposes. On its Skadarlija Street front, the Bohemian Hotel has opened, which, with the factory’s preserved façade and its painted retro architecture, as well as with the use of industrial elements in the interiors and rooms, strives to maintain the visual heritage of the neighborhood. And within the factory’s block, corridors, inner courtyards and warehouses, a seemingly spontaneous maze of small bars has developed, enlarging the street’s old school entertainment choice with the characteristic ruin pub feeling of recent decades.

The forced closures imposed by covid is used for renovation in the Skadarlija district. The allegedly hundred-year-old cobblestones are being re-laid on the streets, and the ruin pubs reconsider their furnishings. A walk in the once bustling, now empty complex is a spooky urbex experience. It is like wandering among the ribs of a long-extinct gigantic animal with an unknown anatomy. What would Berlin not give for such scenery, magnificently ruined and then set up with a well-considered spontaneity.



Slonovski Bal: Papazička Rečenica. From the CD Slonovski Bal: Džumbus (2006)

Three-Handed Mother of God

I recently bought this icon at the Odessa flea market. It follows the popular Hodegetria (She who points the way) type, in which Mary holds Jesus with one hand, and with her other hand points at him as the source of salvation. The model-setting icon of Hodegetria was preserved in Constantinople until the fall of the city in 1453, and it was the most revered icon and protector of the city, which became one of the most common types of the Mother of God.

On this icon, even the uninitiated eye notices two unusual things. One is that only the faces, the hands and one foot of Christ are painted, as if it were a dressable figure, whose unpainted surface will be covered with clothes anyway. And that’s exactly what it is. Since the late Middle Ages, icons began to be “clothed”, covered with embossed silver, gilded silver or copper icon covers, “revestments”, which left exposed only the central subject of the depiction, with reference to the biblical place where the Lord commands Moses to prepare the ark of the covenant: “Overlay it with pure gold, both inside and out, and make a gold molding around it.” (Exod 25:11). The purpose of the cover was, on the one hand, to raise the dignity of the icon, and on the other hand, as I wrote earlier, to “remove” it from the believer, to emphasize its not-of-this-worldliness. The icon cover is called in Russian оклад, and in Greek ἐπένδυση, that is, ʻblanket’, but if it covers everything except faces, hands and feet, it is already called риза or ἔνδυμα, that is, ʻcloth’. This kind of small, mass-produced 19th.-c. icon, where the surfaces intended to be covered with riza were not even painted, were called подокладница, ʻunder the oklad’. The nails holding the former cover in place are still visible on the icon. The cover itself was probably torn off because of its copper or silver content, in an age when that was considered more valuable than the icon.

The other unusual thing: how many hands do you see on the picture? Inclduing mine, holding the icon: six, but excluding it: five, which is an overcount for only two figures. Mary hold Christ with two right hands, pointing to him only with her left.

You could explain it by saying that the customer him- or herself decided which hand they preferred, and it was left uncovered by the maker of the riza, but this subjective approach is alien to the use of the icon. The truth is that, in the model for this picture, Mary also had three hands. This is the icon of the Three-Handed Mother of God, Икона Божией Матери «Троеручицы», Παναγία Τριχερούσα, or Bogorodica Trojeručica.

Two Troieruchitsa icons from Russia, 19th c.

This icon type has a peculiar and winding story. Its origins go back to St. John of Damascus (ca. 675 – 749), who was a great defender of the icons during the Byzantine iconoclastic debates. The iconoclastic emperor Leo III thus slandered him to the caliph of Damascus, in whose service John was (in fact, John’s grandfather, as Damascus’s governor, had handed over the city to the Arabs, and therefore the Christian administration remained in place for some time). The emperor forwarded forged letters to the caliph, stating that John had encouraged him to attack the Arabs. The caliph gave credit to the letters, and threw John into prison, where he cut off the treacherous hand with which he had supposedly written the letters as a complementary punishment. John prayed all night in front of the image of the Mother of God, then fell asleep, and by the time he awoke, Mary had miraculously restored his hand to its place. John rejoiced so much that he wrote the hymn In thee rejoiceth every creature in honor of the Mother of God, and he placed a silver copy of his hand on the icon as an ex voto. In the following 19th-c. Russian icon (from Jackson’s auction site) we see both John’s prayer and the ex voto already placed on the picture.


The hymn, which is still sung in the liturgy of St. Basil the Great and in the morning service, has its “own icon”. In the center of it, the Mother of God sits on a throne (“he made your body a throne”), with a church above and a flowering garden around her (“hallowed temple and spiritual paradise”), the “ranks of angels” around her and “the race of man” under her feet. And before her, St. John of Damascus, bowing, and showing the text of the hymn on a scroll.

Novgorod, 16th c. From the church of St. Peter and Paul in Kozheviki. Novgorod, Museum

The original Greek version of the hymn, performed by Nektaria Karantzi:


Ἐπὶ σοὶ χαίρει, Κεχαριτωμένη, πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις • All of creation rejoices in you, O full of grace

Ἐπὶ σοὶ χαίρει, Κεχαριτωμένη, πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις· Ἀγγέλων τὸ σύστημα καὶ ἀνθρώπων τὸ γένος, ἡγιασμένε ναὲ καὶ παράδεισε λογικέ, παρθενικὸν καύχημα, ἐξ ἧς Θεός ἐσαρκώθη καὶ παιδίον γέγονεν, ὁ πρὸ αἰώνων ὑπάρχων Θεὸς ἡμῶν· τὴν γὰρ σὴν μήτραν θρόνον ἐποίησε, καὶ τὴν σὴν γαστέρα πλατυτέραν οὐρανῶν ἀπειργάσατο. Ἐπὶ σοὶ χαίρει, Κεχαριτωμένη, πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις δόξα σοι.

All of creation rejoices in you, O full of grace, the ranks of Angels and the human race; hallowed Temple and spiritual Paradise, glory of Virgins; from you God was incarnate, and He, who is our God before the ages, became a little child. for He made your body a throne and made your womb more spacious than the heavens. All of creation rejoices in you, O full of grace; glory to you!

In Russian, with the male choir of Valaam Singing Cultural Institute:


О Тебе радуется, Благодатная, всякая тварь • All of creation rejoices in you, O full of grace

О Тебе радуется, Благодатная, всякая тварь, Ангельский собор и человеческий род, Освященный Храме и Раю Словесный, Девственная похвало. Из Неяже Бог воплотися и Младенец бысть, прежде век Сый Бог наш. Ложесна бо Твоя Престол сотвори. И чрево Твое пространнее небес содела. О Тебе радуется, Благодатная, всякая тварь, Слава Тебе.

All of creation rejoices in you, O full of grace, the ranks of Angels and the human race; hallowed Temple and spiritual Paradise, glory of Virgins; from you God was incarnate, and He, who is our God before the ages, became a little child. for He made your body a throne and made your womb more spacious than the heavens. All of creation rejoices in you, O full of grace; glory to you!

and in Arabic, the mother tongue of St. John of Damascus, sung by Gabriel Maalouf in the Arab Christian cathedral of St. Nicholas in Los Angeles:


إن البرايا بأسرها تفرح بك يا ممتلئة نعمة • All of creation rejoices in you, O full of grace

But back to the icon. Shortly after this incident, St. John of Damascus withdrew from the caliph’s service and became a monk in the Saint Sabbas Monastery in the Holy Land.

The Saint Sabbas (Mar Saba) Greek Orthodox monastery, named  after its Syriac monk founder (483) next to Kidron Creek, today in the West Bank Palestinian Autonomous Region. After the Crusades, the monastery was burned down by the Bedouins. In 1504 it was bought by Serbian monks who lived here until 1630 with the financial support of the Russian Tsar, who used them as a counterweight to the Greek Patriarchate of Jerusalem. With the end of the Tsar’s support, the Serbs were forced to sell the monastery to the Patriarchate, to which it belongs today. Here lived and is buried St. John of Damascus.

He also took with him the miraculous icon, with the silver ex voto. After his death, the icon was preserved in the monastery. When St Sava (1174-1236), a son of the Serbian king Stefan Nemanja, the first archbishop of the independent Serbian church, and the later abbot of the monastery of Studenica, visited the monastery, they gave him the icon as a gift. Sava brought it to Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos, reestablished by him for the Serbian monks. The icon stayed there until 1347, when King Dušan took it with him to Serbia, where it was placed in Studenica Monastery.

A Serbian full-length Trojeručica from the iconostasis of the Belaja cerkva in Karan, 1340-42

With the intensification of Turkish attacks, sometime in the 15th century, it was sent back to Hilandar, according to the legend, by being placed on the back of a donkey, which went by itself directly to the monastery in Mount Athos. During an abbot election, a quarrel started in the monastery, so Mary took over the leadership of the community. Since then, the icon of the Three-Handed Mother of God has been the abbot of the monastery, and they only elect a vicar for her.

The Three-Handed Mother of God today in Hilandar, and its copy from ca. 1350 without oklad in the same monastery

Numerous copies of the icon have been made over the centuries, which also copied the silver hand placed on it. One of them was taken by the Russian patriarch Nikon (1605-1681) from his visit to Hilandar, and its veneration also spread in the Russian church. There, the origin of the third hand was no longer clear to many painters, but it could not be ignored because of the authority of the original: so it was simply accepted and continued to be painted as if it were a third hand of Mary. An evidence for this fact is that the “third hand” is also painted on my icon as a real hand, even though it was obviously intended to be surrounded by an oklad. It would have been more faithful to the original to depict the added hand only on the oklad.

The icon of the Three-Handed Mother of God, together with the story of its origin, in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church in Tallinn

This 1845 icon from St. Petersburg is not covered with a riza but with an oklad, which allows you to see the dress of the Mother of God. The “third hand” apparently reaches out from a similar sleeve, although its color is darker than the other two.

Danubian clouds

The plane takes off, for one minute it seems to move toward the downtown, but then turns sharply south, it follows the line of the Danube. On both sides of the river’s strip, the colorful chessboards of arable lands, mining lakes and salty backwaters shine in the vaporous afternoon sunshine.


After crossing the Serbian border, the plane soon reaches Vukovar where the Danube, obeying the orders of the old kings, turned to the east, and still outlines the boundaries of a missing country. The plane, before saying goodbye to that country, and continuing its journey south through the long Serbian corridor in front of the crowded rooms of the small Western Balkan peoples, describes an elegant circle above the last river bend, which, along with its three tributaries, draws a complex circuit on the Bačka plain.


The Erdőd (in Croatian, Erdut) Bend, as the Danubian Islands blog writes, was forced to turn to east by the Erdőd loess range, which rises up to sixty meters above the river. The loess range, extending from Almás to Erdőd, is well visible on the map of the First Military Survey (1763-1787). To the east, at Almás the Drava flows into the Danube, from the south the stream, which the map still calls Weis Graben, and from the north the tiny river of Mostunka. If, on the map of Mapire.eu, you click on Options, and then you set the layer of “First Military Survey” to 0%, you will see that the lake under the former Rácz Millidits and today’s Srpski Miletić, which, in the foreground of the photo, repeats the bend in the shape of a half moon, gathered up from the water of the river.


The afternoon vapors have become thicker, and a multitude of tiny clouds rise up from the hot plain, forming a threatening cloud cup. Sometime, when kayaking on the Danube, we used to look up worried, whether it would be poured upon us before we camped. Below, the Danube is the reality, the paddle strikes, the country borders. From below, the clouds floating above the large water belong to it: they are the Danubian clouds. Seen from above, the three-dimensional world of the clouds is realistic and self-contained: they do not belong to anything, least to the tiny strip meandering on the worn cloth of the earth. Nevertheless, they are the same Danubian clouds. This is why I could send this photo to the Danubian clouds photo contest of the Danubian Islands blog, where it won the first prize. The river has been stretched to the sky, “the foundations flew upon high.”

Tamás Sajó: The cloud looks back

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.