Belgrade and WWI

Staircase damaged in WWII

Gavrilo Princip (right)

In the past few days, we have been in three countries.  We flew out of Prague, Czech Republic on Thursday, landed in Munich, Germany (the capital of Bavaria where BMW originated, and lederhosen are traditional clothing), and continued on to Belgrade, Serbia.  We will be staying in Belgrade for the next eight days with my grandmother.  Today, we visited a fortress called Kalemegdan, where on display were pictures of Belgrade after World War 1 and 2.  Above is a picture of a staircase damaged in WWI, and the same staircase today with my brother, mother, grandmother, and me standing on top.  Some other photographs depicted what sparked WWI.  The tension in Europe was already high, because many countries wanted to expand their boarders.  As soon as the Turkish Ottoman Empire was forced out of Bosnia (which is next to Serbia), the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed it.  That made the members of the organisation called "Young Bosnia" (Mlada Bosna) angry because they wanted independence.  They had meetings in Belgrade, and eventually , a member named Gavrilo Princip shot the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia which marked the beginning of WWI.  In the photograph, Princip is sitting on the right of a bench in Kalemegdan park, very close to where we are standing in the picture with the staircase.