Novakovic2011.12.20 [09:22]
The Chapel - Skull Tower, Niš
The Tower is a monument to the First Serbian Uprising, which was retaliated by the then Turkish rule in Serbia, built from the skulls of dead Serbian soldiers at the Battle of Cegar. Located at 4 km from the city of Nis, on the road to Niska Banja. It is categorized as a cultural monument of exceptional importance for Serbia and is today a museum Assessment is that at the battle of Cegar, which was on 31st May 1809, killing about 6,000 Turkish warriors.
To justify such a loss of Nis, Huršid Pasha ordered the dead skin from the head of the Serbs skinned, filled with straw and sent to Constantinople. Then, in order to intimidate the Serbs, ordered the warning sign on the east side of Nis, tower built of stone and the walls went up into her skull killed the remaining soldiers, so that the middle of the tower is simple, made of stone and lime and the head of Serbian soldiers to turn to the field and outside. "
The tower was built in the period from June to autumn, the 1809th year, at the former entrance in NiŠ from Constantinople, which is now in the center of the quarter Trošarina. It is made up of four support walls (about 4.5 m wide and 0.5 m thick) that were leaning on each other, making a hollow, curved form whose initial height was 5 feet. In it are built into the skull killed 952 insurgents, arranged in symmetrical rows. Although the Turks forbade Serbs to refer the skull with its walls, many heads were stripped and secretly buried in nearby cemeteries.
Although in the second half of the nineteenth century, a modernizer of the Turkish state Mithat Pasha decided to demolish the tower, as shame, it was not done by the intervention of Niš Turks. This has continued to 1892. The Tower was exposed to weather, followed by contributions from all over Serbia, the architect Demetrios Leka, was built above it today chapel. On the yer 1937, when sixty-year anniversary celebration of the liberation of Niš from the Turks, when clearing the central part of the building, found several skulls, which are reintegrated into the tower. Today the only remaining 58 skulls. One of which is specifically allocated to piedastal, as a skull of the leader of the uprising Stevan Sinđelić.
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