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Issue No. 16 · 7-minute read · Sarajevo, 1914
On a warm Sunday morning in June 1914, a motorcade of six cars wound through the streets of Sarajevo. In the second car sat Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie. It was their wedding anniversary. Neither of them would see the day end.
The day had already nearly claimed their lives once. A grenade had been thrown at the motorcade earlier that morning. The bomb bounced off the Archduke's folded-back convertible roof and exploded beneath the following car, wounding several of his officers. Franz Ferdinand, shaken but composed, delivered his planned speech at City Hall and then insisted on visiting the wounded in hospital.
It was a small act of decency. It would prove fatal.
"Of what use is it to travel if you are always in danger?"
— Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, to her husband, that morning
The route that changed everything
The security detail hastily revised the route to the hospital, deciding the motorcade should travel straight along the Appel Quay — a wide, open boulevard, easier to protect. The drivers were informed. Most of them.
The lead car turned off the Appel Quay onto Franz Josef Street, taking the original, pre-attack route by mistake. The car carrying the Archduke followed. Then someone realised the error and shouted to stop. The driver of Franz Ferdinand's car, Leopold Loyka, braked — directly in front of Schiller's Delicatessen.
It was the wrong place to stop. Or rather — it was exactly the right place, if you happened to be Gavrilo Princip.
A conspirator eating a sandwich
Princip was nineteen years old, a Serbian nationalist and member of a secret society called the Black Hand. He had been part of the original assassination plot that morning. When the bomb attack failed and the motorcade sped away, he had given up for the day and stepped into Schiller's Delicatessen, reportedly to buy a sandwich.
He walked back outside and found himself standing five feet from the Archduke's open-topped car, which had stalled while the driver tried to reverse.
Princip drew his pistol. He fired twice. The first bullet struck Sophie in the abdomen. The second hit Franz Ferdinand in the jugular vein. Both were dead within the hour.
28 June 1914 — the day in sequence
28 June 1914 — the day in sequence
From two bullets to fifteen million deaths
The assassination set off a chain of ultimatums, mobilisations, and alliances that Europe's great powers had been building — and dreading — for decades. Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia. Russia mobilised in Serbia's defence. Germany backed Austria-Hungary and declared war on Russia, then France. Britain entered when Germany invaded Belgium. Within six weeks of that wrong turn on Franz Josef Street, most of Europe was at war.
By the time it ended in 1918, approximately seventeen million people were dead. The map of Europe had been redrawn. Four empires — Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and German — had collapsed. The seeds of a second, even deadlier world war had been planted.
All of this because a driver didn't get the message about the revised route.
The lesson historians keep returning to
Historians debate endlessly whether World War I was inevitable — the product of deep structural forces like imperial rivalry, militarism, and interlocking alliances that made some kind of catastrophic conflict likely. But the assassination was the trigger, not the bomb itself. Had Franz Ferdinand survived Sarajevo, the war might have been delayed, or might have started differently. Or the powder keg might have been defused. What the wrong turn reminds us is that history turns not just on grand forces, but on the smallest contingencies: a missed message, a stalled engine, a young man in the wrong place buying lunch.
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A footnote on the driver
Leopold Loyka, the driver who took the wrong turn, largely escaped the historical record. His mistake is documented but his fate is not well known — history, in its usual way, remembered the assassin and the Archduke and forgot the man who, without malice or intention, put them together.
Gavrilo Princip was arrested immediately after the shooting. Too young to face the death penalty under Austro-Hungarian law, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He died of tuberculosis in a fortress cell in April 1918, seven months before the war he helped ignite came to an end. He was twenty-three years old.
He reportedly told a psychiatrist who examined him in prison: "I am not a criminal, for I destroyed a wicked man. I thought I was doing good." (doing so ultimately lead to the death of 70 million people…)
What did you think of this edition?
Until the next edition — stay curious.