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Germany, the Germans and all things Teutonic, while praising the vitality, unpredictability and passion of local Slavs. The book is in essence an epic love-letter to the Slavs, written at a time when one of Europe’s great peoples, the Germans, had lost their way under Nazi rule.
    As I refined my plans, it was a relief not to be confronting the risks associated with earlier trips that I had undertaken through African war zones. At peace for more than a decade, the region I would be travelling through was one no longer framed by war. Ask students today what they know of Serbia and they are more likely to mention its annual music festival, Exit, than the conflict of the 1990s. Launched in 2000 in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, Exit has grown raucously and exponentially each summer into one of Europe’s most popular music festivals – a sort of Glastonbury, but without the mud.
    The Internet has always seemed like the world’s greatest library opening up through my laptop and, even though I was such a long way from the Balkans, useful leads soon began to surface. Online search engines made it easy enough to track down old friends whom I had known as translators, from Sarajevo to Belgrade, and without exception they all responded positively to my emails. As the research trail sprouted new branches, I uncovered a few words of Serbo-Croatian lodged unused for years in a remote part of my brain, although the language’s name now had to be handled with care. The nationalistic wars that pulled Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s have made using the old term, ‘Serbo-Croatian’, potentially offensive. The different communities today speak of their own exclusive language, whether it is Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian. It required sensitivity when I introduced myself to local sources and set about explaining my plan.
    One of the words that came back to me clearly enough was vukojebina, an earthy term whatever you call the language. It translates as ‘where the wolves fuck’, a synonym for the ‘back of beyond’. During the war of the 1990s it was a term I often heard to describe the more remote areas of Bosnia, many of which were impossible to reach because they lay behind hostile frontlines. I was delighted to see that Princip’s route cut straight across some of these, so I would be covering new territory on this trip – terra that had remained for me infuriatingly incognita when trapped inside besieged Sarajevo.
    Among my favourite books had been the memoirs of a British journalist-adventurer, Arthur John Evans, who had walked extensively throughout Bosnia in the 1870s when the Ottomans were on the point of being replaced as occupiers by the Austro-Hungarians. Evans would later become world-famous as the archaeologist who discovered the Minoan civilisation on Crete, but as a young man fresh from Oxford he tramped through Bosnia and would later write on the region for the Manchester Guardian, the precursor of today’s Guardian. His methods were slightly different from those of the modern-day reporter – he often carried a pistol – yet there was still much to admire. Rereading his memoirs, I found that in a letter dated February 1877 Evans described passing within a mile or so of the Princip family home at Obljaj. As I was about to embark on my own long overland journey, his description of the charms and challenges of walking through Bosnia added to my sense of anticipation:
    Those who may be inclined to ‘try Bosnia’ will meet with many hardships. They must be prepared to sleep out in the open air, in the forest, or on the mountain-side. They will have now and then to put up with indifferent food, or supply their own commissariat … those who delight in out-of-the-way revelations of antiquity, and who perceive the high historic interest which attaches to the southern Slavs; and lastly, those who take pleasure in picturesque costumes and stupendous forest scenery; will be amply rewarded by a visit to Bosnia.
    Sleeping out in