Gavrilo Princip
Bosnian assassin
Gavrilo Princip (Cyrillic: Гаврило Принцип) (25 July 1894 – 28 April 1918) was a Yugoslav nationalist, famous for assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in 1914. The assassinations set off a chain of events that led to World War I. He had Tuberculosis and had come from a poor family, which, combined with the fact that he was a Nationalist, made him kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in 1914.
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Quotes edit
- There is no need to carry me to another prison. My life is already ebbing away. I suggest that you nail me to a cross and burn me alive. My flaming body will be a torch to light my people on their path to freedom.
- Said to the prison warden on being moved to another prison; as quoted by Borivoje Jevtic (1914) [1]
- Our shades shall tread Vienna's streets, roaming the courtyard, striking fear in noble hearts.
- Written on the wall of his prison cell shortly before death
Quotes about edit
- The fact that Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia emerged as one of the victor states of the war seemed implicitly to vindicate the act of the man who pulled the trigger on 28 June – certainly that was the view of the Yugoslav authorities, who marked the spot where he did so with bronze footprints and a plaque celebrating the assassin’s ‘first steps into Yugoslav freedom’. In an era when the national idea was still full of promise, there was an intuitive sympathy with South Slav nationalism and little affection for the ponderous multinational commonwealth of the Hapsburg Empire. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s have reminded us of the lethality of Balkan nationalism. Since Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo, It has become harder to think of Serbia as the mere object or victim of great power politics and easier to conceive of Serbian nationalism as an historical force in its own right. From the perspective of today’s European Union we are inclined to look more sympathetically – or at least less contemptuously – than we used to on the vanished imperial patchwork of Austria-Hungary.
- Christopher Clark, Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012), p. xxvi
External links edit
- Encyclopedic article on Gavrilo Princip on Wikipedia