This new short story, published as a Thistle Single on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Priest-Assassin-Archduke-Franz-Ferdinand-ebook/dp/B00LAECAQW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1403768284&sr=8-3&keywords=katharine+quarmby
is my third Single, as they are now called, to come out in the last couple of years. The first was an exploration of my search for my Iranian birth father, Blood and Water. The second was a short story, loosely fictionalised, about filming in Rwanda, after the 1994 genocide, called Aftermath. This is the second in my very loose family trilogy – this time a story about my mother’s family history (my adoptive mother), who is half Serbian, Spanish and a little bit English (less than me, as she delights in saying). This story is about her Bosnian Serb grandfather, Dean Kosta Bozic, who was rumoured to have known, and blessed Gavrilo Princip, if not his bloody enterprise, just before the fateful assassination in 1914 that became the trigger for the First World War. We do not know if this is true, but my grandmother always used to say that there was, somewhere, a photo of Kosta Bozic and Gavrilo Princip together. It is true, Tim Butcher, the brilliant author of The Trigger told me, that Princip lodged with members of the Bozic family – whether they were close relatives of Kosta is also not recorded. Kosta was also arrested, in 1916, charged and found guilty of high treason. Like Princip he contracted TB and died of it – in his case, just after leaving prison. It is also true that he is buried, and then dug up to be buried again with greater ceremony by a grateful Serb nation. It was then found that his right arm was miraculously whole – the rest of him was bones. This was probably due to the aromatic spices in the censer he swung, day in, day out, as an Orthodox priest, and which preserved the flesh, but was hailed as a kind of miracle.
Anyway, I have taken the ‘facts’, as related to me by my grandmother, researched historical facts, and fused them into this short story. I hope it works. The next and last part of the trilogy is my dad’s story (my adoptive dad), who is from Yorkshire farming and hunting stock. His family, from way back, used to be keepers of hounds for hunting folk. They were the Smith family, and I will be telling their story, with much embroidery, and bodice ripping (and some real diary entries, honest), next. My dad is quaking in his boots and keeps on trying to divert me to other stories….
Katharine Quarmby 