Open Access

Arthur James May

• If the Bosnian crisis of 1908-9 may properly be described as the dress rehearsal for 1914, the Austrian project, announced early in 1908, to construct a railway from the Bosnian border through the Sandjalc of Novibazar helped to set the stage. Part of the original program to link up the Ottoman realm with central Europc by iron highways, this line had been overlooked for decades as finance, engineering, and diplomacy spent themselves on the great trunk line, the Orientbahn, running like a backbone down the Balkans to Constantinople, with a branch connecting Nish with Salonica via Uskub. From Uskub a spur penetrated northward to Mitrovitza; another linked Salonica with Monastir. Though small in itself, the reappearance of the Novibazar scheme heralded the revival of the perennial Austro-Russian rivalry over the Near East in an acute form, sharpened international animosities generally, strengthened latent dreads of Teutonic hegemony over the Balkans, and gave an impetus to a plethora of competing railway projects. In spite of Austria's renunciation of her rights in the Sandjak as part of the settlement attendant upon the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the railway plan was not abandoned, and until well along in 1909 hopes were cherished that the Sandjak road - even today unconstructed - would be built.