Famous Wrong Turns in History

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On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie, visited Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Awaiting the visiting royal couple were six Bosnian-born Serb terrorists, strung out along their route. They were seeking to avenge Austria’s recent annexation of Bosnia, which once, albeit six centuries earlier, had been part of the long-vanished Serbian Empire.

A terrorist threw a hand grenade at the open car carrying the archduke and his wife, but the grenade only wounded members of the archduke’s entourage. The archduke, after complaining to the Austrian administration about the lack of security (“I come to Sarajevo on a friendly visit and someone throws a bomb at me? This is outrageous!”), decided to visit the wounded in the hospital. En route, the driver took a wrong turn and, in the course of backing out of the street, came to a stop in front of a sidewalk cafe where one of the frustrated assassins, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, was getting drunk.

Astonished at his opportunity, Princip stepped out of the crowd and fired two shots. The first severed the archduke’s carotid artery, and the second hit his wife’s abdomen. Both died within minutes.

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Inspired by crescentcity's post:

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Chicken added the "political board."

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