A Church In a Graveyard With Tombstone Walls
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on St Vitus’s Day. To those who applauded the assassination, the members of Young Bosnia who carried it out would be forever known as “The Vidovdan Heroes.”
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on St Vitus’s Day. To those who applauded the assassination, the members of Young Bosnia who carried it out would be forever known as “The Vidovdan Heroes.” And even though Gavrilo Princip and his cohorts were imprisoned throughout the Austro-Hungarian empire, where most of them died in prison of tuberculosis, their bodies still found their way back to Sarajevo – where a group of young, unknown men completely changed the course of world history with one act.
Most of the Young Bosnia members died before World War I ended, and although the staff at Therensienstadt prison where he had been held took care to bury his body in an unmarked grave, someone still remembered and made sure that the Kingdom of Yugoslavia knew where to recover the body of a man they considered a hero.
Our shadows will be walking through Vienna, strolling through the court, frightening lords. written by Gavrilo Princip on his cell wall in Theresienstadt
The Vidovdan heroes were brought back to Sarajevo, and on 7 July 1920 they were buried in a mass grave in Sarajevo.
In 1939 construction finished on a chapel in the Holy Archangel Michael and Gabriel cemetery, a chapel that used tombstones from a derelict Orthodox cemetery in the neighbourhood of Marijin Dvor to build its walls. The bodies of the Young Bosnia members were transferred to this chapel, surrounded by hundreds of years of Sarajevo’s Orthodox population, preserved in Old Cyrillic.
On the chapel is a quote by the Montenegrin Poet Petar II Petrović Njegoš: Blessed are those who live forever, they were not born in vain.