SARAJEVO MUSEUM 1878-1918

This museum (Muzej Sarajevo 1878-1918) is the major piece of the Sarajevo museum which occupies five sites in the old town. It is dedicated to the Austro-Hungarian period and more particularly to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Consisting of a single room, it stands on the site of the Austrian food store Moritz Schiller Delicatessen, in front of which the attack took place on June 28, 1914. Opened in 2014, it replaces the Young Bosnia Museum founded here in 1949 by the socialist authorities. They wanted to highlight some positive aspects of the event that triggered the First World War, in particular the multi-community character of the Young Bosnia organization responsible for the attack. The presentation is now sober and neutral: eight sections display chronologically and thematically objects illustrating the Austro-Hungarian period, from the placing of Bosnia-Herzegovina under trusteeship in 1878 to the breakup of the Empire in 1918. The 1914 assassination is illustrated by two detailed plans showing the outward and return routes of the heir's convoy and the positions of the revolutionaries, by photographs of the latter, especially during their trial in Sarajevo in October 1914, by the clothes of the gunman, Gavrilo Princip, on the day of the assassination, as well as by period weapons (the originals are in Vienna) and two mannequins in costume representing Franz Ferdinand and Sophie leaving the Vijećnica, a few minutes before they died.