A wrong turn, a sandwich, and the shot that started World War One
Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 after a wrong turn stalled the car in front of him — but the famous sandwich he supposedly ate was added decades later.
- Claim
- A wrong turn and a sandwich started World War One
- Catch
- THE SANDWICH THAT WASN'T
- Verdict
- The wrong turn happened. The sandwich didn't.
On Sunday 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, rode through Sarajevo with his wife, Sophie, in an open car. It was their fourteenth wedding anniversary, and Sarajevo was marking Vidovdan, the feast of St Vitus. Six young men had been placed along the motorcade route with bombs and pistols. The first attack failed: Nedeljko Čabrinović threw a bomb that bounced off the car's folded-back cover and exploded behind them, wounding about twenty people, before he swallowed an old cyanide pill that only made him vomit.
The archduke and his wife decided to visit the wounded in hospital. To avoid the city centre, the governor directed the car straight along the Appel Quay — but he never told the driver, Leopold Lojka. Lojka followed the original plan instead, turned right onto a narrow side street, and the engine stalled. The gears locked. Gavrilo Princip, nineteen, was standing by Moritz Schiller's delicatessen on that corner. He stepped forward, drew an FN Model 1910 pistol, and fired twice at close range. The first bullet struck Franz Ferdinand in the neck, the second hit Sophie in the abdomen. Both died within the hour.
Princip was arrested at once. At his trial in October 1914 he said he was a Yugoslav nationalist who wanted Austria out of Bosnia — and he also said he had meant to kill the governor, not the Duchess, and that he regretted her death. Too young to hang under Habsburg law (he was twenty-seven days short of twenty), he got twenty years. Tuberculosis, worsened by harsh prison conditions, killed him on 28 April 1918 at the Terezín fortress; he weighed about forty kilograms.
Austria blamed Serbia and, within weeks, Europe was at war. The record complicates the simple version: Austria's own investigator, Friedrich Wiesner, reported on 13 July that there was no evidence implicating the Serbian government, and Princip told his prison psychiatrist that the war would have come anyway. Vienna used the murders as an excuse for a war it wanted.
The catch
The part everyone adds is the sandwich: Princip supposedly eating one outside Schiller's while he waited for the car to stall. It isn't in the 1914 trial record, and no contemporary account mentions it. The wrong turn itself is real — Lojka really was never told about the route change, and the car really did stop in front of Princip. But the delicatessen snack was added decades later, turning a chaotic day into a tidy myth.
Verdict
A real wrong turn, a made-up sandwich — and a world war that didn't need Princip to happen.
Sources
- Sarajevo trial records, October 1914 (Princip's trial statement; the motorcade, the bombing and the shooting as described at trial).
- Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2013), for the route change, the stalled car and the July Crisis.
- Princip's 1916 prison interviews with psychiatrist Martin Pappenheim, and Friedrich Wiesner's report of 13 July 1914 finding no evidence of Serbian government involvement.
The images in the video are AI-generated illustrations, not archival photographs.
SOURCES
- Sarajevo trial records, October 1914 (Princip's own statement at trial; descriptions of the motorcade route and the stalled car).
- Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2013), for the wrong turn and the July Crisis.
The images in this video are AI-generated illustrations, not archival photographs.
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