Olive, neither of the East nor of the West

The Skull Tower of Nis - Serbia

A macabre tower 15 feet high in Nis, Serbia, was once covered with 952 skulls; 58 still remain embedded in the crumbling edifice to bravery in the face of death.

During the 1809 Battle of Cegar, the Serbian rebels were incredibly outnumbered by the advancing Turkish forces. Yet refusing to surrender, the Serbian leader Stevan Sinđelić shot at a packed gunpowder depot, its explosion killing him, his men, and much of the enemy army.

The Turkish leaders were furious, and to serve as a warning to anyone else who so brazenly went against the Ottoman Empire, the dead rebels’ heads were decapitated, and their scalps were stripped and stuffed and shipped back to the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II in Constantinople for evidence of their defiant deaths. Each of their skulls was then lodged in a tower, with Sinđelić’s skull placed at the very top.

Yet the brutality didn’t stop the Serbians’ desire for freedom, and years after the liberation of Niš in 1878, a chapel was constructed in 1892 around the deteriorating tower. Many of the skulls had been removed by families for burial, but many still remained, and what remained became an emotional memorial to sacrifice, and a morbid reminder of barbarism of war.

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