On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess Sophia, were in a six-car motorcade doing an annual military maneuver in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Unbeknownst to them, a team of six conspirators between the ages of 17-27 had lined up along their route, armed with guns, grenades, and cyanide pills. During the first section of the parade on the way to City Hall, a grenade was thrown into the motorcade, hitting the car directly behind the Archduke. Making haste to City Hall, the Archduke insisted on continuing the parade as planned on the original route, with a small detour to visit the injured from the explosion. Back in the car, they arrived at the crossing at Latin Bridge. This is where Gavrilo Princip fired two deadly shots, one hitting the Archduke in the neck, the other hitting the Duchess in her abdomen. In the court trials that followed, eight men were charged, and the three over the age of 20 were executed. The assassination was credited to a small unorganized terror cell called Young Bosnia, and while the Austro-Hungarian government demanded the arrest of Milan Ciganov, Vogislav Tankosic, and Dragutin “Apis” Dmitrijević for the alleged involvement of the Black Hand, a Serbian military society, the Serbian government refused.
Austria-Hungary and the various governments in the region that followed insist that the assassination was a coup done with the full support of the Serbian government. Serbia and its subsequent governments maintain that Young Bosnia and possibly the Black Hand acted independently, and as the government found out information about the possible attack, they did what they could to stop it.
The play Archduke focuses on four of the men involved in the plot to kill Franz Ferdinand: Gavrilo Princip, Ndedeljko Čabrinović, Trifko Gabrež, and Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijević. This is what we know.
Gavrilo Princip (right), Nedelko Chabrinovich (center), and Trifko Grabej (left) in Kalmegdan park in Belgrade, probably May 1914.
Photographer unknown. International War Museum, UK.Gavrilo Princip
Gavrilo Princip was a Bosnian Serb born in the small town of Krajina. He moved to Sarajevo at 13 to join the army, but a friend of the family recommended he attend merchant school instead. It was there that he was introduced to Panslavism. After participating in the 1912 Anti-Austria demonstration in Bosnia, he fled to Belgrade in Serbia to avoid arrest, where he met members of the Black Hand and started training with them. At the time of the assassination, he was 19 years old. He was the 5th assassin on the parade route but ran to Čabrinović’s position after hearing a grenade go off. He ended up witnessing Čabrinović’s arrest. With the crowds too chaotic to get a good shot, he repositioned himself on the original parade route hoping the couple would keep going – which they did. When the car stopped at a pedestrian crossing at Latin Bridge, Princip fired the shots that killed the Archduke and his Duchess. As he was under 20 and therefore ineligible for the death penalty, he was sentenced to a maximum of 20 years imprisonment, but contracted tuberculosis in prison and died in 1918.
NEDELJKO ČABRINOVIČ
Nedeljko Čabrinović was also 19 years old at the time of the assassination. A Bosnian Serb, he was born in Sarajevo and worked as typesetter at a local printing press. In 1912, he was involved in a physical altercation at work and as a result was expelled from his home by his father. He worked in various cities before ending up in Belgrade, where he met Princip and members of the Black Hand. He was second in line along the parade route, positioned on a bridge over the Miljacka River. When the motorcade came around, he threw the grenade, but it hit the car behind the Archduke. The two officers in that car were severely injured and the explosion caused chaos. Čabrinović then attempted to take the cyanide pill, and while it did poison him, it did not kill him. With authorities closing in, he jumped off the bridge into the Miljacka River, but it was too shallow. He ended up arrested and sentenced to 20 years like Princip and died in prison of tuberculosis in 1916.
Trifko Gabrez
Trifko Gabrez was the last of the three assassins who were trained in Serbia prior to the assassination. Born in Pale, a small Serb town in Bosnia, he was expelled from school in 1912 for striking one of his teachers and moved to Belgrade to continue his education. Gabrež was 6th and last along the parade route. He claimed that when he heard the grenade go off, he abandoned his station to find Gavrilo Princip and then got lost in the chaos of the stampeding crowd and was unable to find his way back to his original post. He, like Princip and Čabrinović, was 19 at the time. He was sentenced to 20 years, contacted tuberculosis, and died in 1916.
Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijević
Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijević was Serbian chief officer and head of military intelligence. More infamously, he was also one of the top members of the Black Hand, a secret military organization based out of Belgrade. Apis was a native Belgradian and had been an active military member through the Balkan wars. He is credited with the assassination of the Serbian ruler King Alexander, who was friendly to Austria-Hungary, in 1903. There was never direct evidence tying Apis to the assassination. When the Austro-Hungarian government demanded access to Apis for questioning, the Serbian government refused, citing concerns of letting a foreign government conduct an investigation on their soil. It was not until 1917 that Apis confessed to organizing the assassination. He was executed for his crime. To this day, there are some who suspect that Apis was covering for his right hand Vogislav Tankosic, for whom there was quite a bit of evidence and testimony of working directly with and training Princip, Čabrinović, and Gabrež, but who had tragically died in combat in 1915 before he could be questioned.
A LEGACY OF VIOLENCE
In the decades that followed the assassination, tensions in the region would take on various forms but always in opposition. After WWI, the governments and their successors remained separated by Ally vs. Axis powers, Capitalism vs. Communism, Western Europe vs. Eastern Europe. With court transcripts lost and so much evidence based in hearsay, and animosity too large to create cultural consensus, we may never truly know how this plot came together. While Archduke is a creation of Rajiv Joseph’s imagination, who knows—it may be closer to the truth than we all realize.