This is the place.
This is the exact spot on the sidewalk from where nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip, a member of Young Bosnia, shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia on June 28, 1914, initiating the July Crisis and then World War I.
A mould of his footprints is imbedded in the sidewalk.
He would have been about four or five paces away from his target.
Killing Sofia was a mistake for which Princip felt a slight remorse.
Sofia was the first victim, a shot to the abdomen.
Franz Ferdinand said his last words to her – Don’t die darling; live for our children – as he took a bullet to the neck.
Both died before arriving at a hospital.
Princip never took a third shot; he was wrestled to the ground by onlookers.
His cyanide tablet failed to kill him and he would be convicted of the assassination and sent to prison, where he would die less than four years later from disease and malnutrition due to poor prison conditions.
That event occurred more than a hundred years ago, and now the Latin Bridge is a shrine of sorts, where tourists gather as on a pilgrimage, to wonder, to take photographs, and to place themselves in the footsteps of history.
