GAVRILO PRINCIP is famous for Gavrila Princip Street in Belgrade, home to my favourite restaurant Zavičaj's, where I have enjoyed three times now the best craft sausage, roast potatoes, cabbage salad, mustard and a memorable house red. GAVRILO PRINCIP is also famous for assassinating, in Sarajevo Bosnia, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and starting World War One. "Assassinate" is too strong a word. I believe he was provoked. The under

‘You who burned my house and killed my child, who shelters beneath a foreign wing, a traitor who accepts a salary from the enemy! Did you...

December 1941: Fleeing the German destruction of Užice in Serbia, Tito and the Partisans crossed the River Drina in winter, climbed the mountains of Bosnia on the other side, and walked through the forests. Bosnia Herzegovina is a very mountainous country. In winter it is snow bound. As someone who has driven through Bosnia in the snow, I have difficulty understanding why the Nazis thought that they could successfully invade the country. Even today, the r

Komiža, Vis - port of the Partisan and Allied fleet September 1943 – Fascist Italy capitulates to the Allies. Nazi Germany invades the...

‘Despite his experiences at Drvar, Tito had not lost his liking for caves,’ wrote Fitzroy Maclean, Churchill’s liaison officer with the Yugoslav Partisans. Less than a fortnight after his dramatic rescue from a cave near Drvar in Bosnia during Operation Rösselsprung, Tito installed himself in yet another cave halfway up yet another mountain on the island of Vis, three hours east of Split on the Croatian coast. At this time, Vis remained the only island in the Adriatic unoccup

'Truth and memory [are] exceedingly fragile,’ writes Deborah Lipstadt in Denying the Holocaust, the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory....

Hats off to Slovenian author Goran Vojnović! I have just finished reading his best-selling novel Yugoslavia, My Fatherland which he...

Friday 10th May Greek trains are dreadful. From experience I can tell you that the Hellas Express was not a patch on the Vienna Express...

THE MEETING by Josip Cazi On rainy evenings we used to walk through the muddy factory town beside the Danube, Jelice, my blue-eyed girl -...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two opposing political movements emerged from the fall of the old empires: the extreme right...