The museum’s vicissitudes reflect the city’s ambiguous and ever-changing relationship with its own past. In 1917 the Austro-Hungarians erected a giant monument at the assassination site. Nearly two years later it was ripped down by the new Yugoslav authorities—though strangely a large central medallion from the monument, bearing the image of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, survives to this day in the basement of another Sarajevo gallery.

In 1930 a plaque was put up to celebrate Princip. In 1941 it was torn from the wall and given to Hitler for his 52nd birthday. After the second world war, Princip was claimed by the communists. Not only was the museum at the corner opened but the assassin’s fateful footsteps were set in the pavement. In 1992 they were destroyed and the museum shut: Princip had to go—Bosnian Muslims and Croats saw him as a Serbian hero. In 2004 a new plaque was unveiled. But it simply states the bare facts of what happened in 1914.

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