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This is certainly among the most famous and most photographed sites in Sarajevo, since it marks the exact spot where France Ferdinand and his wife Sophia Chotek were shot by Gavrilo Princip.A this very place is currently the Museum of Sarajevo and former monument marking the assessination of the Archduke and his wife. This was the very event that triggered the First World War, yet in the same time symbolising the fight against the presence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the territory of what will be later known as the first state of South Slavic people - Yugoslavia. Young Bosnia was a revolutionary movement active in the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria-Hungary before World War I. Its members were predominantly young male students, primarily Bosnian Serbs, but it also included Muslims and Croats. There were two key ideologies promoted amongst the members of the group—the Yugoslavist (unification into a Yugoslavia) and the Pan-Serb (unification into Serbia). Philosophically, Young Bosnia was inspired by a variety of ideas, movements, and events, such as German romanticism, anarchism, Russian revolutionary socialism, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Battle of Kosovo. Princip’s act gave Austria-Hungary the excuse that it had sought for opening hostilities against Serbia and thus precipitated World War I. In Yugoslavia—the South Slav state that he had envisioned—Princip came to be regarded as a national hero.

Born into a Bosnian Serb peasant family, Princip was trained in terrorism by the Serbian secret society known as the Black Hand (true name Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, “Union or Death”). Wanting to destroy Austro-Hungarian rule in the Balkans and to unite the South Slav peoples into a federal nation, he believed that the first step must be the assassination of a member of the Habsburg imperial family or a high official of the government.

Having learned that Franz Ferdinand, as inspector general of the imperial army, would pay an official visit to Sarajevo in June 1914, Princip, his associate Nedjelko Čabrinović, and four other revolutionaries awaited the archduke’s procession on June 28. Čabrinović threw a bomb that bounced off the archduke’s car and exploded beneath the next vehicle. A short time later, while driving to a hospital to visit an officer wounded by the bomb, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were shot to death by Princip, who said he had aimed not at the duchess but at Gen. Oskar Potiorek, military governor of Bosnia. Austria-Hungary held Serbia responsible and declared war July 28.

After a trial in Sarajevo, Princip was sentenced (October 28, 1914) to 20 years’ imprisonment, the maximum penalty allowed for a person under the age of 20 on the day of his crime. Probably tubercular before his imprisonment, Princip underwent amputation of an arm because of tuberculosis of the bone and died in a hospital near his prison.