Free Republic

I always remember from history class that WW1 started for some sad reason (the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand). I always thought how stupid / futile it was considering what it led to. Yet here we are with the Slovak PM assassination attempt. Gavrilo Princip (Serbian Cyrillic: Гаврило Принцип, pronounced [ɡǎʋrilo prǐntsip]; 25 July 1894 – 28 April 1918) was a Bosnian Serb student who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie, Duchess von Hohenberg, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The killing of the Archduke and his wife set off the...

Serbia on Sunday unveiled a monument to Gavrilo Princip, whose assassination of the Austro-Hungarian crown prince in Sarajevo helped ignite World War I and still provokes controversy in the ethnically-divided Balkans. Hundreds of citizens attended the ceremony in central Belgrade held on the anniversary of the 1914 assassination which is also the Serbian national holiday of St. Vitus Day. President Tomislav Nikolic described Princip—who is viewed as a terrorist by many outside Serbia—as a freedom fighter and hero. …

1914 : Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated In an event that is widely acknowledged to have sparked the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of Emperor Franz Josef and heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is shot to death along with his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on this day in 1914. The great Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, the man most responsible for the unification of Germany in 1871, was quoted as saying at the end of his life that “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in...

IT WAS a shot that echoed round the world. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand - heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire - was assassinated in the Balkan city of Sarajevo more than 90 years ago it heralded the beginning of the most brutal conflict the world has ever seen. Yet during this week of remembrance commemorations which culminates in Remembrance Sunday on November 14, a Hampshire man has made an incredible discovery. Historian, Brian Presland, from Chandler's Ford visited the Vienna Military Museum where the car which the archduke took his last fatal drive is preserved to this day. When he got...