DANAŠNJE VIJESTIBBChttp://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28062876Sarajevo marks 100 years since Archduke Franz Ferdinand shooting
Bosnia is commemorating 100 years since the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the act that triggered World War One.
Cultural and sporting events, including a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic, are marking the occasion in the city.
Gavrilo Princip, who shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, continues to be a divisive figure in Bosnia.
The shots fired by the Bosnian Serb on 28 June 1914 sucked Europe's great powers into four years of warfare.
Bosnia's Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks are still divided over the role Princip played in bringing tensions to a head in Europe in 1914, with counter-commemorations planned by Bosnian Serbs.
In Austria, Franz Ferdinand's great-granddaughter and family will be holding events at the family castle at Artstetten, near Vienna, where he is buried.
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Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife walking along with others in Sarajevo before their assassination.
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Leaders of Serbia and some Bosnian Serbs are boycotting official events, which they say are designed to incriminate Serbs.
On Friday, Serbs in eastern Sarajevo unveiled a statue of Princip, seen by them as a national hero who ended years of occupation of the Balkans by the Austro-Hungarian empire.
In the eastern town of Visegrad, actors will re-enact the murder of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, and the Belgrade Philharmonic will play music by Vivaldi.
Franz Ferdinand and his wife
Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were shot dead in their car by Gavrilo Princip
The newly renovated birth house and a bust of Gavrilo Princip on 27 June 2014
Bosnian Serbs are planning to open the house in Obljaj where Gavrilo Princip was born in his honour
A man waves a Serbian flag as he walks through the mock-village of Andricgrad in Visegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina - 28 June 2014
Serbian and Bosnian Serb leaders are holding their own events in the eastern town of Visegrad on Saturday
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Anita Hohenberg speaks about her great-grandfather Franz Ferdinand
The commemorations in central Sarajevo will take on a completely different tone to those in the east of the city, says the BBC's Guy De Launey.
The Vienna Philharmonic will play a selection harking back to Hapsburg days, including Haydn's Emperor Quartet, he adds.
The concert is being held at the newly-restored national library, which was destroyed during the 1992 siege of the city by Bosnian Serb forces in the Bosnian War.
Austrian President Heinz Fischer will be attending the concert, which is the centrepiece of official events marking the anniversary.
Commemorations are due to close with an open-air musical memorial event in Sarajevo.
Twenty-eight European Union leaders gathered on Thursday to mark 100 years since the beginning of World War One at Ypres in Belgium.
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Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip
Princip and the shot that sparked WWI
Gavrilo Princip, one of seven members of Mlada Bosnia (Young Bosnia), a Bosnian Serb militant organisation which wanted independence from Austria-Hungary
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie shot dead in their car by Princip on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo
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Meanwhile, the UN cultural organisation Unesco has asked all vessels at sea to fly their flags at half-mast on Saturday to mark the assassination anniversary.
The organisation is trying to highlight its convention on underwater cultural heritage, designed to increase safeguards for thousands of sunken ships vulnerable to deliberate destruction and looting.
The agreement only applies to century-old wrecks so over the next four years, thousands of British, German and other ships lost in World War One will be added to the list.
CNNhttp://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/27/opini ... index.htmlThe man who started WWI: 7 things you didn't know
Editor's note: Tim Butcher is an author, journalist and former war correspondent who specializes in blending travel and history writing. His first book, "Blood River," about crossing the Congo, was a bestseller and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. His latest book, "The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin who Brought the World to War" was published in May.
(CNN) -- A century ago this Saturday on a street corner in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip fired the shot that started World War I when he killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. What do we know about history's greatest teenage troublemaker?
1. His name was Gavrilo, or Gabriel.
Our history teachers taught us that World War I began after a gunman killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
The shooting acted as a trigger, metastasizing from a Balkan street corner into a continental crisis by releasing pent-up tension between rival blocs of Great European Powers: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany on one side and France, Russia and Great Britain on the other.
The name of the gunman was Gavrilo Princip, his first name meaning Gabriel in his mother tongue, Serbian. His mother had wanted to call him Spiro after her late brother, but the local priest intervened saying the boy should be name after the Archangel Gabriel.
2. He was only 19 when he triggered the first global conflict.
Author and historian Tim Butcher
Author and historian Tim Butcher
Surely history's greatest teenage troublemaker, Princip was a student in his last year of high school -- the eighth grade -- when he fired the shot that sparked World War I.
His exact age was a matter of intense legal scrutiny after the assassination because so many people in Austria-Hungary believed a death sentence appropriate for the assassin who had killed the heir to the Habsburg empire. But the Austro-Hungarian legal code was clear on capital punishment. Only those 20 years of age or older on the day of the offense could be executed.
The recorded birth date for Gavrilo Princip was 13 July, 1894, making him 19 years, 11 months and 15 days on the day of the assassination, in other words just two weeks inside the deadline that would have seen him hanged.
It all got a bit complicated when a council record was found by investigators that suggested he had actually been born on 13 June 1894, making him old enough to execute. But after much legal debate it was accepted that this record was a mistake -- the month of July in the Cyrillic script used by the parish can easily be mistaken for June.
Princip was sentenced to 20 years in prison -- the maximum penalty for someone his age at the time -- but would be dead before the guns of WWI fell silent, dying of tuberculosis in the hospital at his jail on April 28, 1918.
3. He had the same nationality as Adolf Hitler.
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100 years ago, at the twilight of the grand imperial era, the notions of the nation state and of nationality belonged to the future. Countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Austria did not exist.
Instead they were bundled together in the sprawling Habsburg Empire, also known as Austria-Hungary, a muddle of divergent ethnic groups often speaking very different languages, and of varying vintages, all under the imperial control of Vienna -- the system was so chaotic that in parts of the empire vehicles drove on the left, elsewhere on the right.
Gavrilo Princip was born in a province of Austria-Hungary that had recently been acquired, an area known as Bosnia Herzegovina. For centuries it had been occupied by the Ottoman Empire but in 1878 it was "flipped," becoming Habsburg territory overnight.
Its citizens did not have passports but they did have travel passes, and as a young man Gavrilo Princip qualified for the same type of pass as that given to Adolf Hitler, who was born further to the northwest, but still within the Austro-Hungarian empire.
4. As an assassin, Princip had the luck of the devil.
The driver of the Archduke's car should have driven straight past Princip at speed but, because of a misunderstanding, he turned the car on the exact corner where Princip was standing and was immediately shouted at to stop.
Princip found his target a sitting duck right in front of him. He fired only one shot at the Archduke with a pistol. By a fluke the bullet cut Franz Ferdinand's jugular vein. He was dead in a matter of minutes.
5. He was not a Serb nationalist.
Princip was actually a south Slav nationalist; although ethnically a Bosnian Serb, he supported a group of activists calling for the unification of all local Slav people in Bosnia: Muslims, Croats and Serbs.
Their dream was to drive out the Habsburg occupier, so shooting the Archduke was seen as a "grand gesture" to inspire others to rise up against the foreign power.
6. The plan worked, but at a terrible price.
The shooting triggered a war that Princip could never have anticipated. Millions died and empires fell -- and eventually, the hated Austro-Hungarians were driven out of Bosnia.
As a result, the local Slavs had the chance to unite in one country, later called Yugoslavia, meaning a nation for south Slavs. In the eyes of some locals there, Princip could be heralded as a "liberator."
7: His legacy in the Balkans was toxic.
The wars that ripped Bosnia apart in the 1990s were driven by ethnic divisions between the local Slav communities: Serb, Croat, Muslim.
The dream of all local Slavs living together was shattered.
Though Princip fired his gun a hundred years ago in hopes of freeing his Slav kinfolk, today he is "blamed" for being an ethnic Bosnian Serb, tainted by association with those extremists responsible for committing atrocities during the Balkans war.
The issue is so toxic that, as the centenary of the June 28, 1914 assassination approached, in Bosnia there was no national consensus on how it should be acknowledged.
History's greatest teenage troublemaker is also, perhaps, history's most toxic teenage troublemaker.
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