Archduke's murder still shakes Bosnia: Robert Fisk talked to people living on the street in Sarajevo where the shot was fired that started the First World War

With her brown-grey hair and unlined, tight-skinned face, Dika looked a decade younger than her 80 years. She complained only about her arthritic feet and ignored the shells that thumped into the trees on the other side of the Miljacka river.

'There are good Serbs and there are bad Serbs,' she said. 'I know many good ones, friends of mine. The others wanted Greater Serbia and we don't want that. We want to keep Bosnia.'

Someone at the end of the street fired a rocket-propelled grenade across the river. Its initial detonation and the swish of the missile did not interrupt Dika. 'What has happened here is something I have no words for. A few years ago, we loved each other. I am a civilised woman, you know. I have travelled. I have been to Dubrovnik and Zagreb. And now I am going to have a lunch of just beans - would you believe I don't remember what meat tastes like?'

Dika has not moved from her second-storey home in the crumbling Austro-Hungarian block on Ulica Asciluk for more than a year. The widow of the director of a local Islamic charity, she was born in 1912, just two years before Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shots which immortalised her native city. Dika purses her lips when you mention the name of the young assassin who initiated the century's game of empire-breaking. A good Serb or a bad Serb?

'They taught me about him at school and he was a hero. He gave his life for his country. Maybe he was better than Karadzic and Milosevic. But how can we know? The future would have been different if he had not shot Ferdinand. Surely.

'But now we have this war. When can you be sure you are safe? People in the streets die from shells without expecting it. I am not afraid of death - only of being wounded. I love life. Princip is nothing to me.'

Opposite the bullet-scratched wall of Dika's little home, Hraudin, a victim of Serbia's 'ethnic cleansing' - he escaped from his village of Nadzevice with only his two children and a small bag of clothes - was less enamoured of the 'Young Bosnian' who ended his life in prison. 'Princip was a dirty man,' he said with venom.

'He got rid of the Austrians who did so much for us. The Austrians built our most beautiful buildings, our bridges and our railway stations. They gave us trains. If it wasn't for that Serb, we would not have this war now. We would be part of the United States.' Hraudin, living now with his sister-in-law, nodded for emphasis, hoping I would enjoy his little dig at the world's only surviving superpower, forgetting the inconvenient fact that Austria was an enemy of Serbia as well as a builder of neo- Gothic railway stations.

The old gatekeeper next door, blue- eyed but hard of hearing, would not even give his first name which - given his record - was probably a reasonable precaution. 'I fought in the Croatian Army in the Second World War alongside the Germans,' he roared with a wicked smile, deaf to the crack of gunfire. 'Then I changed sides and joined Marshal Tito's partisans. I did OK. What do I care about Gavrilo Princip? He's in the past.' But not for all the residents of Ulica Asciluk. Nedo Pokrajcic, doctor and painter, member of the Bosnian Territorial Defence Medical Brigade, unlocked the door to his apartment block and walked unsteadily up the stairs to his home. It was tiredness that made him giddy. He had just returned from the front at Merkovici, fighting alongside Croatians and Muslims against Serbs. He talked very slowly, sometimes without completing a sentence.

'My father had an old friend, a very distinguished academic who later taught in Helsinki. I think this man once met Princip. He described him to my father as an alcoholic, tubercular student, a shit. But I think maybe something positive came from what he did, from killing Archduke Ferdinand . . . The young Bosnians here wanted a museum on the corner of the street where he assassinated the Crown prince . . . it was a kind of patriotism, I suppose. At least Princip had idealism, which is more than you can say for Karadzic.'

Shellfire hissed over the apartment as Pokrajcic warmed to his theme. 'He was honoured, you know, as a Bosnian. But hooligans came two months ago and tore down the plaque on the street corner where he killed the Archduke. They even tore up the stone with the imprint of two feet which marked the spot where he stood when he fired the shots. If he had not shot Ferdinand? Well, we would still be Austrian - and Sarajevo might have been a little Vienna. But things are different. Princip started the First World War when men were forced to go and fight. Today we are not forced to fight. I am a volunteer.'

Democratic war. It was a peculiar lesson to draw from the act of the Serb who plotted with the 'Young Bosnia' movement, uninstructed by Belgrade, to strike on 28 June 1914 at the Austro- Hungarian empire which had annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Stranger still when you realise that Pokrajcic and the deaf old Ustasha, Hraudin and Dika live less than 40 feet from that very street corner on which Princip changed the history of the world.

And it was still just possible yesterday to see that killing ground. At the end of Ulica Asciluk, where bullets were cracking into the street surface and grenades whiffling above the crumbling 19th-century town houses, you had to turn left and run as fast as your feet would carry you in the direction of a graceful river bridge.

And there, sure enough, a hunk of pavement had been removed, a rectangle of broken glass and dirt upon which stood the man who shot dead the flabby Archduke, whose act sent my own father to the trenches of the First World War, the man who destroyed empires and first made the name of Sarajevo synonymous with disaster.

The air vibrated with the explosion of grenades. Rubble and the dead branches of trees lay across the riverside road along which the Archduke and his wife drove to their deaths 72 years ago, the echo of Princip's fatal shots now deafening us, so shattering that they are at last destroying Sarajevo.