Exhibition Not so Long Ago...Fellow Citizens opens Tuesday

BELGRADE - An exhibition entitled Not so Long Ago... Fellow Citizens, which shows the life of Young Bosnia members before the Sarajevo assassination of Austro-Hungarian prince Franz Ferdinand, will be opened at Belgrade's Kalemegdan fortress on Tuesday as part of the programme marking the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One.

Young Bosnia's member life in Belgrade will be put on display.

Photographs and parts of letters and messages will show what Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, Trifko Grabez, Bogdan Zerajic and other members of Young Bosnia looked like, where they met and what kind of lives they led.

One of the two existing photographs of Gavrilo Princip that do not show him as a prisoner or convict was taken at Kalemegdan, where Princip came daily in the first half o f 1914.

Other members of Young Bosnia, like Ivo Andric (a writer who later won the Nobel Prize), Vasa Cubrilovic (who became a university professor and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts after the war) and spiritual teacher of this group of young people Jovan Skerlic (a literary critic and historian), also visited Kalemegdan often for walks or meetings.

Members of Young Bosnia spend their student days in Belgrade in poorly furnished rooms, sometimes in abandoned buildings and even rubbish dumps.

Their poverty was so severe that they often had to sell personal items to survive, including their most prized possessions - books. The spent their free time debating in Belgrade bistros.

The exhibition is part of the event entitled 100 Years Ago - A City in Europe, which is organised by the city company that runs the Belgrade Fortress to mark the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One.