Sorcha asked Tim Butcher:

According to your book and Gavro's school records, there was a period when he was at the merchant school in Sarajevo when he would skip class. What do you think a bookish teenager with very little money would be up to during school hours in that time and place? Also, thanks for "liking" my four star review. :)

Tim Butcher Thank you for your interest and question: Edwardian era Sarajevo was a time of rumbling trouble for the colonial occupier, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Gavro was a bookish young man. We know that from the collection of named/inscribed books he left behind, so when not in class we can be sure he spent time reading. He was also part of the `kavana kulture’, young people (male mostly) who met in kavana (coffee shops). In Sarajevo the coffee shops reflected reality so you had western ones (Austro-Hungarian influence, possibly ethnic Croatian owners, maybe colonial immigrants), eastern ones (run by ethnic Serbs) and Turkish ones (owned by local Muslims influenced by the long but recently replaced Ottoman occupation).
These coffee shops were the internet chat rooms of the time, places where angry young men could plot and vent and dream, all the time sitting around a thimbleful of thick local coffee. We know Gavro spent time in several. Indeed, the family of one of his friend’s owned one. I found advertising flyers for the Best Home Made, Real Coffee, that sort of thing.
We know he hung around with those grumbling about Austro-Hungarian rule, the Young Bosnians. Some of them were militant, others more moderate. One of their campaigns was to deface German script on the windows of businesses, coffee shops (again coffee shops) etc when it used Gothic font. Harmless enough but a building block on the way to full blown violence.
So Gavro, far from home, his older brother out of town and not able to rein him in, steadily becomes more and more militant during this time. Can we say which coffee shop cabal pushed him to his final act? No. Which activity (for example the hill walking where he wrote terrible poetry about the might of nature). No. But we can say it was part of a transformative continuum that took a village boy with a talent for words and turned him into history’s must destructive assassin.

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