As Arnie gabbled away about never having had a hike to match the one we had just shared, I felt quietly relieved that we had made it safely on foot through some of Bosnia’s more mine-contaminated backwoods. The walk had given me a sense of how far Gavrilo Princip had come when the ‘weak boy’ left home for the first time, not in terms of mileage, but more in terms of breaking with the only life he had ever known. He had left behind the closed rural society of Serbian serfdom and would encounter for the first time other Bosnians – Muslims and Croats – with their identifiers: religious buildings, clothes, food, traditions. It must have been bewildering for him as a thirteen-year-old to shift horizons so radically, to break away from the confines of a social system static for so long – one that had, in common with much of Europe, for centuries been framed by the strictures of hierarchy, feudalism and empire. To find out how Princip responded I would need to head on to Sarajevo, where he went to school.
