Bang Bang Gavrilo Princip

Sarajevo

A local guy showed a few of us round some places last night. The best of them was a bar that only the Bosnians know about, it's not signposted from the road and you have to go through an alley down some stairs and into a kind of grotto. Bono spent New Year's Eve there in 1995 and although there was no sign of him last night the bar was still good and I stayed out drinking beer and tequila until the early hours.

Went looking for the spot where Archduke Franz Ferdinand got shot in 1914 earlier on. The assassin Gavrilo Princip used to be a big hero in Yugoslavia and had streets named after him all over the place, but being a Serb nationalist he's not too popular in Bosnia anymore and there's hardly any trace left of the momentous event. The street's name has been changed and once they've finished rebuilding the Gavrilo Princip bridge that was destroyed in the recent war they're going to call it something else. The nearby museum's long since been shut and now there's just a cursory plaque at the roadside that doesn't even mention the fact the shooting sparked off the First World War. In a city full of painful history it's just one more thing they want to forget about.