Word: principality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sarajevo, the problem, of course, was not that it was unknown, but the nature of its fame. Has a history test ever been drawn up anywhere in the world that did not require the answer: "The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo"? The people of Sarajevo have nonetheless stoically retained their fierce pride in a history rich--that is to say complicated--enough to explain even Princip. It is good, however, to have newer memories, though even recollections of the 1984 Winter Olympics touch on the subject of Princip...
...surplus is being used to flog the tourist industry generated by the bonanza of Olympic publicity and the banishment of Princip's ghost. Sarajevo has devoted a $2 million fund solely to cementing the Olympic image by staging additional world-class sporting events--world speed-skating championships, European bobsled championships and the like--in hopes of attracting the fans and tourists who follow them. So far, the strategy is working. With round-trip air fare from New York and seven days in a hotel at the foot of Olympic ski runs costing just $680, the tourists are coming...
...bungling police forgot to tell the chauffeur of the lead car about the change, so he made a wrong turn at the bridge into a narrow alley, then had to stop and back out. That maneuver forced the archduke's car to a halt, right where Princip happened to be standing. "I got hold of my handgun and aimed it at the car without really looking," Princip later testified. "I even looked away when I fired...
...Princip swallowed his cyanide pill, but it did him little harm. Neither did the authorities who convicted him of murder but could not execute him because he was a minor. Sentenced to 20 years, he died of tuberculosis in prison in 1918. By then, the war that started with a punitive Austrian attack on Serbia had bled all of Europe white. But Princip's deed did finally achieve its purpose. In the redrawing of maps that followed the war, the Austro-Hungarian empire dissolved into fragments; both Serbia and Bosnia were included in the new state of Yugoslavia...
...fighting, of course. When Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, Sarajevo and its mountains became a center of fierce resistance. Both German and Allied bombers raided the city. Nearly 15% of its inhabitants died in the war. The Slavs remember such things proudly. That is why Princip, who is regarded by most of the world as a fanatic, is commemorated here by the two footprints near the river...