Christmas? In Kashan?? At the edge of the Iranian desert?? Maybe rather in Isfahan, among the Armenians of New Julfa, or with the Assyrian Christians in Tabriz or Tehran… But the title is no mistake, there was a Christmas in Kashan as well, at least once. And guess what, one of the participants was Hungarian.
Christmas in the Armenian district of Isfahan. Photo taken in 2019 by Mortezâ Sâlehi from here
Gergely Béldi de Uzon was a member of an aristocratic family from Transylvania. He was appointed as vice-consul to Tehran in the summer of 1914 at the age of 26. In the absence of the envoy, Logothetti, he was in charge of the affairs. At first life in Persia seemed to be one of ease – in August 1914 they spent two weeks hunting in Mazandarân –, but things became complicated soon enough.
Though Persia (as Iran was called at that time) officially stayed neutral in the Great War, it was heavily under the influence of Russia and Great Britain, while in domestic politics one political crisis ensued the other for years. Soon after the outbreak of the war the Germans tried to make Persia an ally of the Central Powers which seemed to turn out a success by the end of 1915. To prevent this, Russians – who already occupied the northern parts of the country since 1911 – sent troops (8000 cavalry and 6000 infantry) under the command of General Nikolai Baratov to the south, to Qazvin.
Iran in the First World War. Source: Yann Richard: Iran. A Social and Political History since the Qajars, 2019. 123. p.
On the news of the advance of the Russians, the diplomats of the Central Powers fled Tehran (the last group of the Austro-Hungarians leaving on the morning of 14 January 1916, disguised as Bakthiyari nomads). Back in early December 1915 Gergely Béldi was south of Tehran in Qom. From there he set out to Isfahan together with a group of Austro-Hungarian officers and soldiers. Then they went on to Abade, where they turned back towards the northeast, to Kermanshah upon the advance of the British troops from the southeast. Finally he arrived via Mesopotamia and Anatolia to Constantinople, then to Vienna on 16 April 1917.
In this period, from 10 December 1915 until April 1917 Béldi wrote a personal diary of his experiences en route, a unique source in which the actual political events are mixed with his personal observations on ornithology and hunting. Later, in 1918 his ornithological notes were published both in Hungarian and German in the Hungarian ornithological journal Aquila. There he gave a brief summary of the hardships of the previous years, illustrating his involuntary Persian voyage with a map.
The voyage of Gergely Béldi through Iran during the First World War. Source: Béldi, Gergely: Madártani jegyzetek Nyugat-Perzsiából és Mesopotámiából [Ornithological notes from Western Persia and Mesopotamia]. In: Aquila 25 (1918) 89. p., accessible here
However, the entire diary was never published. Nowadays one copy is kept in the Archives of Vas County in Szombathely, Western Hungary in the family archives of the Chernel family (presumably a copy of the original, based on its even, clear handwriting). Supposedly it ended up there via Béldi's wife, Erzsébet Mannsberg, a relative to the Chernels. Maybe it is due to the ornithological observations, as a member of the family, István Chernel was a famous ornithologist of his time (and the editor of the Aquila journal), just as later Gergely's son, Miklós too.
His account would not put Baedeker or Lonely Planet to shame, though. He obviously didn't have an eye neither for the Iranian landscape, nor for the milieu in general. He writes about the landscape and Kashan (where they arrived on the evening of 22 December 1915) in such detail and manner:
“We arrived to Kashan in the evening. The road was of no interest. The great, plain Kevir [the desert] to the left and some hills to the right. A large inquisitive crowd was waiting for us outside the city. Kaschan(!) is a city stretching all over and one of no interest, with the usual narrow, arched bazaars.”
However, the wartime circumstances are an excuse for him (how would you enjoy the road if you should take it fleeing from the advancing Russian army on horseback and among uncertain rumors?), as well as the fact that even if he wanted to, he could not visit the nowadays must-see places of Kashan, like the Fin Garden (on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2012) or the historical houses.
According to his account they spent 23 December in Kashan and as they had to marched on the following day, they had an early Christmas Eve there, under rather unconventional circumstances, exactly 109 years ago:
“XII. 23. We rest for a day. Napravil commanded the soldiers that today is Christmas Eve. We had to go on the next day and we could not celebrate it then. We sat together, me, the two officers (Napravil and Daskiewicz) and the two Jewish physicians and we celebrated Christmas Eve as much as we could. We ate raisin and almond and drank red wine at the light of a candle, lying on the carpet.”
There was even time for an occasional bargain earlier that day, though it turned out very soon that it was not a good deal:
“I bought from one of the Swedish officers, who was still there, a fine-looking 6-years old chestnut stallion. I wondered at the low price he asked for it, but the next day I realized why. He went on very well and tame but as soon as I got off of him, as a tiger, he attacked the other horses and kicked them where he reached them. Thus until Isfahan I could not get off and at the lodgings I had to find an empty stable and could only get off there. I cursed the Swedish many times. Otherwise, he endured fatigue better than the other horses we had.”
On 24 December they went on to Isfahan and in the evening they arrived to a caravanserai. His short description reflects the circumstances very well:
“XII. 24. At noon we departed for Isfahan. We, Napravil and I, got lost again fortunately. We departed later than the soldiers and the people showed us the shorter way because they didn't know that the others go with a wagon and that we would go with them. When we discovered our mistake, we passed through the stony wasteland and after a long fumble and stumble we reached the others in the dark at a half-collapsed caravanserai. which was full of fleeing Cossacks. They did not have a single bit of discipline and would not make place for us. We didn't even try to throw them out as they were many and the air was already rather awful in the rooms. Thus we set up our beds in a half-collapsed stable where seemingly stray dogs used to give rendez-vous to each other. But we cleaned the place and settled in well enough. What a poor Christmas Eve!”
We hope our readers will have a a richer and less adventurous Christmas.
***
I noticed it only after writing this post that the Hungarian Iranist Miklós Sárközy gave a lecture on Gergely Béldi's diary just a few weeks ago. The recording of the lecture is available online (only in Hungarian) since 21 December but I didn't have the time to watch it until the publication of this post. Thus I wrote this post without knowing it and before it became available, waiting only for the anniversary to publish the story of Gergely Béldi’s unconventional Christmas in Kashan.
I recently wrote about how Mussolini’s frasi celebri – quotes from his historical speeches, which, writes Umberto Eco, “marked all my childhood, and whose most significant passages we memorized in schools” – can still be read on many walls in Sicily. This may indicate that Sicilians still look with some nostalgia to the days that brought the island some economic boom and a harsh suppression of the mafia. Or also the fact that Italians are generally quite indifferent to political slogans, and actually don’t care if the inscription is there or not. This would probably be the most painful to Mussolini in hindsight. And finally, it also shows how the façades of many buildings have not been renovated for at least eighty years.
The problem emerges when they are finally being renovated.
Just ten years ago I wrote about those brush-painted or stenciled wall inscriptions in Budapest, on which the occupying Soviet army announced in Russian, in the spring of 1945, that Мин нет, i.e. the house had been searched and no mines were found in it. When I was a high school student, there were still plenty of such historical relics all over the city, but after the change of regime in 1990, they were not spared during the renovation of the façades, and they disappeared one after another. At the time of the 2013 post, I had only found two of them intact. Even a friend of mine, a restorer wrote me that he himself had removed one during the restoration of the façade of the palace at Andrássy út 4. While in Vienna, at the restoration of Bäckerstraße 13, special attention was paid to the preservation of the Soviet sign. Incidentally, this is the iconic house where The Third Man (1949) was filmed at the same time as the inscription was created.
Around this time last year, the owners of Lilie’s Café in Cefalù, roughly on the right edge of the panorama above, faced a similar dilemma. The façade of the building displayed for eighty years, increasingly worn, this quote of Mussolini:
«In sette mesi abbiamo conquistato l’Impero, in tre mesi appena lo abbiamo pacificato.»
“In seven months we conquered the Empire, and we pacified it in exactly three months.”
This quote is from Mussolini’s speech of December 18, 1936, given to the residents of Pontinia, the new town founded on drained Agro Pontino. It refers to the occupation of Ethiopia, which was conquered by brutal methods during the seven months between October 3, 1935 and May 5, 1936. In fact, Mussolini considered it to be part of the great Mediterranean Roman empire to be restored, so much that he was also willing to accept international sanctions for it (about which see the Gangi marble plaque, presented in the previous post).
For eighty years, the inscription did not disturb anyone, just like all the other ones throughout Sicily. But in October 2021, Harrison Ford came to Cefalù to film the last episode of the Indiana Jones series. The location was Lilie’s Café, which was renamed Clemente Cafè, and the sign on its façade was covered with a large Cinzano advertisement.
And when filming ended in January 2022, they left a generous sum of money to the bar to restore the façade. That’s when the question became relevant: what to do with the inscription? It is one thing to indifferently watch it disappear for eighty years, and another thing to intentionally remove it during restoration, or, on the contrary, to preserve it when there was an opportunity to remove it.
In the end, the second solution won, with the support of the local office of the protection of monuments, but in a rather contradictory way. The façade was completely repainted, and the inscription was subsequently repainted on it – with a modern typography different from the original, in a different color, and on a slightly different place.
“In this way, it’s worth nothing more than a graffiti hastily painted in the night”,says a comment in the Postazioni militari in Sicilia 1940-1943 Facebook group.
The result is actually worse than that. The action did not preserve the original historical memento painted in 1936, but merely updated the memory of Mussolini’s saying. At its sight, you don’t feel like seeing a historical ghost sign, but that this saying, which reminds us of a tragicomic “Empire” created through genocide and despite international public opinion and sanctions, is still important to someone there. Between the two original alternatives, removal and preservation, this third was certainly the worst choice.
Ethiopians greeting Mussolini’s portrait in occupied Mekele, November 1935
Petralia Soprana is a charming medieval town in north-central Sicily, at the inland foot of the Madonie mountain range that separates the cheerful Cefalù coast from the hopeless inland hills. It has everything you need: winding medieval streets, a Baroque cathedral of Romanesque origins, a Norman castle which was converted into a Carmelite monastery after the Arab threat has passed, its weekly Friday market, on which day it is forbidden to enter the city from 9 am to 1 pm, a begun but never finished highway, on the six pillars of which a car park has been arranged, and, last but not least, a town hall, with a pastry shop below, and a small park in front with a monument to the fallen heroes.
The Piazza del Popolo on the feast of the armed forces, November 4, 2022
Today, in the age of democracy, the small park is called Piazza del Popolo, but in the anti-democratic age it was called Vecchia Vuccirìa. In the Sicilian language, vuccirìa means cacophony and confusion, in which today’s speakers tend to recognize the root voce, ʻword, sound’, but this is a false etymology. The name actually comes from the French word boucherie, cattle market, and the noise associated with such markets leads to the word’s modern meaning.
The ʻcattle market’ lends a special second meaning to the monument in the middle, which, according to tradition, commemorates those massacred in the war. The monument was dreamed up in 1929 by Antonio Ugo (1870-1950), a prolific sculptor during Fascism, head of the sculpture department of the Accademy of Fine Arts in Palermo, in the popular “Novecento” monumental classicist style of the period, which was so close to other – German or Soviet – imperial styles. The young Roman warrior going to war swears to defend his country with his sword held above a burning altar, like Mucius Scaevola. From under his arm, his anxious old mother peers at the altar, which is probably decorated with the motif of the Eucharist for her – and for Petralia Soprana’s similar old women’s – sake. On the other side, the hero is supported by his wife in going to war, only she knows why. Her arm embraces their Michelangeloesque child, who is partly secretly grieving his father’s heroic decision, partly drawing strength from his mother’s clothes for the time after his father’s fall, which is what this post is about.
Strangely enough, there is no inscription on the monument, although space was left for it, and the holes of the dowels fixing the former marble tablets are still visible.
We are probably dealing with another case of the historical cognitive dissonance which, as we have seen, is so characteristic of the small towns in Sicily. Mussolini’s rule brought development and public security to Sicily, and a harsh suppression of the mafia, which was only restored to its former monopoly by the Anglo-Saxon landings in 1943. The island therefore finds it difficult to give up its Mussolini-era monuments, which remind them of a bygone golden age that has not been reached since. In the main squares of small towns, Mussolini’s frasi celebri can still be read, and still there are sculptures and statues from his era. In the neighboring Gangi, the nationalist memorial plaque of 1936 was first removed in 1945, and then put back due to popular pressure. Probably this monument also had some dedicatory inscription which it was thought better to remove. The monument speaks for itself eloquently enough.
In the photo above, on the corner house overlooking the monument – which may have been an office or a party center – you can still see that under the balcony there was once a text painted in the font typical of public Mussolini quotes. What exactly it was, can be told only by the dwindling age group that can still browse the frasi celebri in their memory and identify the still readable groups of letters.
Much more interesting historical documents are the still-preserved inscriptions that were painted on the façade in May 1946, long after the fall of Mussolini, and which celebrate the monarchy and the king.
“Long live the King! Long live the monarchy!” The hammers and sickles that were faded above and below were not repainted like the royalist inscriptions.
These inscriptions are perhaps unique survivors of a campaign that preceded the June 2, 1946 referendum on Italy’s form of government.
The question of the form of government caused tensions in the domestic politics of united Italy from the very beginning. The spiritual father of the unified Italian state, Giuseppe Mazzini, who founded the Giovine Italia movement in 1831, dreamed of this state as a democratic republic that would abolish all previous kingdoms. However, the unification of Italy was ultimately carried out under the leadership of the king of Sardinia and Piedmont, in reality as a kind of internal colonization. Garibaldi, who united the country from the south, from Sicily, was indeed a republican, but for the sake of a unified Italy, he finally handed over his conquests to Victor Emanuel II. This even made some of his party colleagues consider him a traitor. The opposition between republicans and monarchists determined the entire domestic politics of Italy until Mussolini came to power in 1922.
After the fall of Mussolini on July 25, 1943, the question gained new relevance. The king fled to southern Italy, controlled by Anglo-Saxon troops, and virtually became a lame duck. In addition, he had already compromised himself by appointing Mussolini in 1922, and supporting his dictatorship for twenty years. In the North, occupied by the Germans, the republican parties were illegally re-established, and participated in the anti-German partisan movement. Therefore, after the liberation of the country on April 25, 1945, they demanded a referendum on the form of government.
The ballot of the referedum on June 2, 1946
One month before the referendum, Victor Emanuel III passed the throne to his son Umberto, whose name is still given to squares in Sicily. This change dates the Petralia campaign inscriptions to May 1946..
“The monarchy is the only one that can guarantee the salvation of the homeland. Long live Umberto! Long live the monarchy!”
The June 2 referendum was the first in Italy to take place on the basis of universal suffrage, i.e. women could also participate in it. Less than half of the population of 45 million cast valid votes, of which 12 million voted for the republic and 10 million for the monarchy. After the proclamation of the republic on June 11, King Umberto handed over the power to the new president, Alcide De Gasperi, and then went into exile.
By projecting the votes on the map, we can see how much the issue divided the country. Roughly to the north of Rome, supporters of the republic predominated, and supporters of the monarchy to the south of it. In eastern Sicily, where Petralia is located, the monarchy achieved more than two thirds. This might be also the reason of the survival of the monarchist campaign inscriptions in Petralia, as silent witnesses of the resistance against the colonizing North.
“It is the careerists and adventurers mad for power who are furiously attacking the monarchy. God save the king! Long live the king! People of Petralia! Vote for the monarchy!”
When future extraterrestrials wonder which living beings went extinct together with mankind in the 21st century, they will come to the surprising conclusion that several mammals had winged variants, and, although their fossil remains have not survived, representations of them will be easy to find. Altogether, man, cattle and lions have each had winged subspecies, it will be concluded. But the most peculiar mutation had to have been the winged lion with the double tail, either as a result of one of the nuclear accidents that had preceded the destruction of humanity, or as a development along with the wings for aerodynamic balance. In the absence of a fossil skeleton, evidence of this two-tailed winged lion will only exist in the form of a statue on the former Klárov Square of the former Prague, on the bank of the Vltava, next to the Lesser Side bridgehead of the Mánes Bridge.
The statue, erected through the fundraising efforts of the British community in Czechia, commemorates the winged Czech lions who, in the 1940s, protected the ground-going British lions against the attacks of the German eagles.
The air force of the Czechoslovak Republic was established in 1918 and ceased to exist exactly twenty years later, when the invading German army disbanded them and confiscated their planes. The Luftwaffe offered to take the Czech pilots, too, but the vast majority of them preferred to emigrate. Many joined the Polish Air Force, and they fought on their side in September 1939, but then fled the country with the rest of the Polish army, and continued to fight the Germans in the skies above other lands. The statue, erected as a gift from the British community in Czechia, commemorates the 2,500 Czech pilots who defended Britain during the “Battle of England” i.e. the ongoing German air strikes of 1940 and 1941.
Looking at the statue, I recall an earlier encounter with such a lion. It was in northern Scotland, on the banks of Cromarty Firth, in the cemetery of the now-perished village of Kiltearn (in local Gaelic, Cill Tighearna). Lloyd and I turned off the main road onto a dirt road leading to the cemetery right on the beach for the ruins of the medieval church and the tombs of the medieval Scottish lairds. We were very surprised to see, among the tombs of the lairds and burghers, a small plot of military graves from the 1940s, of three Canadians, twelve Poles and one Czech pilot.
The Czech sergeant, Jaroslav Kalášek was of the same age as the Czechoslovak Air Force: he was born in 1918 and died in 1944. According to the Czech war graves register, he fled to England in 1939, through Hungary and France, that is, together with the Polish army, which, after the coordinated German-Soviet invasion of Poland, was given a free escape route by Hungary, despite the displeasure of the German ally. He served in the coast guard unit of the British Air Force, which defended the industrial centers of Scotland against German airstrikes, thus making that coast a bit of a Czech sea. Their resistance is remembered, in addition to the war graves, by the artificial island in front of the middle pillar of the World Heritage Forth Bridge, with the remains of an air defense battery protecting Scotland’s east coastline.
Those of the Czech winged lions who survived the war were awaited by the damnatio memoriae at home. During the decades of Cold War, it was forbidden to talk about the service of Czech pilots in the British Army. Nevertheless, the regime remembered precisely who took part in this officially non-existent service: they were persecuted, imprisoned as enemies of the system, forced into menial jobs, and denied pensions. They were rehabilitated only after the Velvet Revolution, by a decree of Václav Havel on 29 December 1989, which restored their rank, pension and place in the historical memory of the country.
The erection of the winged two-tailed lion in 2014 also belongs among the gestures of restoring historical memory. However, it does not please everyone. A 2014 issue of Český rozhlas published, under the title “Circus in Klárov”, a legitimate criticism on the various postmodern sculptures spotted in this amorphous square of the Lesser Side, including “the extremely poorly modeled lion by the British sculptor Colin Spofforth, who makes kitschy sculptures exclusively for shopping mails, and whose work was never allowed out in public spaces”.
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.
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