Skull Tower is a stone structure embedded with human skulls located in Niš, Serbia. It was constructed following the Battle of Čegar of May 1809, during the First Serbian Uprising. Serbian rebels under the command of Stevan Sinđelić were attacked by the Ottomans on Čegar Hill, near Niš. Knowing that he and his fighters would be impaled if captured, Sinđelić detonated a powder magazine within the rebel entrenchment, killing himself, his fellow rebels and the encroaching Ottoman soldiers. Vizier Hurshid Pasha ordered that a tower be made from the skulls of the fallen rebels. The tower is 4.5-metre (15 ft) high, and originally contained 952 skulls embedded on four sides in 14 rows.

In the centuries following its construction, Skull Tower has become a place of Serb pilgrimage. In Serbia, and among Serbs both inside and outside the country, it is considered a symbol of the country’s struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Skull Tower is one of the most visited places in Serbia, with 30,000–50,000 visitors annually. In the early 1830s, French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine wrote of the tower upon visiting Niš, which was at the time still part of the Ottoman Empire.

Čegar tower is a location in Serbia where the Battle of Čegar Hill took place. Today’s monument in the shape of a tower – a symbol of the soldiers’ fortification – was erected for the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Niš from the Turks, on June 1, 1927. In 1938 a bronze bust of Stevan Sinđelić was positioned in the semicircular niche of the monument. Čegar Hill, under the command of Stevan Sinđelić, was attacked by the Ottoman troops. The battle lasted the whole day. As Milovan Kukić witnessed, the Turks attacked five times, and the Serbs managed to repulse them five times. Each time their losses were great. Some of the Turks attacked, and some of them went ahead, and thus when they attacked for the sixth time they filled the trenches with their dead so that the alive went over their dead bodies and they began to fight against the Serbs with their rifles, cutting and sticking in their enemies with their sabers and knives. The Serbian soldiers from other trenches cried out to help Stevan. But there was no help, either because they could not help without their cavalry, or because Miloje Petrović did not allow it. When Stevan Sinđelić saw that the Turks had taken over the trench, he ran to the powder cave, took out his gun, and fired into the powder magazine. The explosion was so strong that all the surroundings were shaken, and the whole trench was caught in a cloud of dense smoke.

Three thousand Serbian revolutionaries, and more than double of that on the Turkish side were killed on Čegar Hill. After the defeat of the Serbian rebel army, the Turkish commander of Niš, Hursid Pasha, ordered that the heads of the killed Serbians were to be mounted on a Skull Tower to serve as a warning to whoever opposed the Ottoman Empire. In all, 952 skulls were included, with the skull of Sinđelić placed at the top.

Adress: Niška, Bobiste, Serbien

Two places to visit in Nis, Serbia