Duke Stevan Sindjelic sacrificed his life on May 19, 1809 battling for Serbian independence against the Ottoman Turks, and in the process attained the status of an almost mythic national hero. The three thousand troops under his command were attempting to hold the hill of Cegar in the city of Ni? against vastly superior forces, and were worn to the point of exhaustion. According to the legends surrounding the battle, Sindjelic realized defeat was inevitable and set fire to a large ammunition dump, forfeiting his own life and those of his troops. Sindjelic’s act ensured that the Turkish victory was Pyrrhic-it cost the Turks more than they gained-and in an attempt to terrorize the local populace and break any further resistance the bodies of the Serbian soldiers were decapitated, and their heads sent to Istanbul as trophies. The Ottoman sultan, however, returned the heads to Ni?, deciding they would be more effective built into a tower by a busy road to serve as a permanent and highly visible symbol of the futility of rebellion.
The resulting Skull Tower of Ni?, or the Cele Kula as it properly called, was hardly a novel idea. In fact, it represented the last-and today the only surviving-example of what had been a long-standing Middle Eastern and Central Asian tradition. Monuments which commemorated military victories by displaying the remains (usually the heads) of vanquished enemies dated back at least the fourteenth century, and most frequently took the form of a tower or pyramid. The most infamous were constructed by Tamerlane, who erected them outside of both Baghdad and Isfahan; one was supposedly built out of 100,000 skulls. Such structures were considered the most effective means to simultaneously celebrate a victory and break any remaining morale among those who survived the defeat. The tradition spread as far east as India-one, built by Akbar, is known from Mughal miniatures.
Even before the Cele Kula, Europeans were familiar with this tradition, principally because of the Burj-er-Roos (Tower of Skulls) on the island of Jerbeh off the coast of Tunis. It was a conical masonry structure about 30 feet high, set all around with the heads of Spaniards who had been massacred by Saracens in the late sixteenth century. The exact history of the Burj-er-Roos is murky, but the story as it was most commonly told involved Spanish troops landing on the island en route from Malta to Tripoli, under a commander whose name is usually given as Juan de la Saera. The Spaniards made their way up from the beach and sacked the nearest town, raping and pillaging at will. The locals, meanwhile, bided their time for a counter attack-they waited until night, when the Spanish troops were drunk and the high tide had cut them off from their vessels on the beach, and slaughtered them to a man. The tower constructed by the victors was topped with the head of de la Saera himself, and reasonable estimates are that it contained the heads of perhaps 800 Spaniards. The Burj-er-roos was a popular site for travelers along the southern coast of Mediterranean Sea through the mid-nineteenth century, but it was finally dismantled in 1848 by Christian inhabitants of the island, who wished to bury the skulls in a Catholic cemetery.1
The Cele Kula is the last skull tower ever constructed; in fact, it was archaic even at its conception since the practice had long been out of style, but was intended to shock the Serbs with its anachronistic display of Old World barbarity. While it may have succeeded in that aim initially, in the end its value became something very different-it wound up being seen not as a mark of humiliation, but a symbol of bravery and heroic sacrifice, and when Ni? was liberated in 1878 the decision was made to preserve it as a patriotic monument. The tower proved to be such a potent memorial that was sanctified in 1892 when a chapel was built around it. Still enclosed in the small domed chapel, the Cele Kula has become a curious nexus in the cultural life of Ni?. For some it holds the status of a sacred relic, for others it is a bizarre curiosity; it attracts serious students of history, but also people with entirely different interests-including a local man who owns a white goose which he claims can commune with the souls of the dead soldiers whose skulls are present in the tower, and pass on messages to their descendents.
Those who visit the Cele Kula now are seeing it in a greatly deteriorated state. The Turks intended it as a warning to rebellious Serbs, not as a monument that would last for two centuries. Technically its construction its crude, and exposure to the elements during the nineteenth century caused the mortar to deteriorate to the point that large numbers of the skulls had come loose, or simply fallen to the ground. Many were taken by locals, either because they wanted to bury them or because they wanted them as mementos. From afar, the stories told during the nineteenth century of the Cele Kula conjured fantastic visions of a gigantic edifice stacked with crania, but this was a far cry from the reality of its condition. The tower was originally composed as a square with 14 rows of 17 skulls per side, for a total of 952, and it quickly fell into disrepair, even as its myth became increasingly glorified and its size and condition greatly exaggerated. A traveler in the 1830s published an account claiming there were 600 skulls on each side, which would be a total of 2400.2 That number was bettered considerably by the Frenchman Alphonse de la Martine, who also visited in the 1830s and published a memoir in the 1840s which declared “there might be from fifteen to twenty thousand” skulls present.3 Both accounts were trumped by an 1854 book which inexplicably described “a pyramid of 30,000 Chistian skulls (Servians), victims of the Turkish sword.”4
Such outrageous accounts caused visitors to the site to be bitterly disappointed. A traveler in the 1830s expressed his disappointment, calling it a “petty affair,” and reporting that in reality there were only a few skulls still remaining.5 By mid-century it had fallen into such disrepair that it was being openly mocked by visitors. An Englishman reported that he found birds nesting in the holes where the skulls had once been, and that a “sparrow’s eggs were being hatched in the brainless peri-cranium of an ancient Serbian patriot.”6 The decrepit block currently holds some 60 skulls, but since more forthright reports indicate that some of these were returned during attempts to rehabilitate the structure, the reality is that visitors to Ni? in the late 1800s arrived to find the tower almost completely denuded of skulls. Efforts to restore the Cele Kula began with the recognition of its patriotic value in the late nineteenth century. The decision to enclose it in the chapel was in part made to help protect what remained, and the tower is now enclosed behind a glass wall so that visitors are unable to touch it, and help ensure that this unique monument-the last of its kind-will be preserved for future generations.
Notes
1. See Thomas Kerrich, “Some Account of the Island of Jerbi, and the Tower of Human Heads, From Information Obtained on a Visit to that Island in the Summer of 1833,” in The Amulet: A Christian and Literary Remembrancer, Ed. Samuel Carter Hall (London: 1836), 9-37; Major Sir Grenville T. Temple, Excursions in the Meditterenean: Algiers and Tunis, vol. 1 (London: 1835), 156-157; Jamrs McCaulley, Wonderful Stories of Daring Enterprise, and Adventure (London: 1887), 100;; “Jerbeh’s Tower of Skulls: A Grim Monument to Saracen Vengeance,” New York Times, 6 Feb. 1881 p.10.; Robert Sears, ed., Sears’ Wonders of the World. Second Series (New York: 1856), 63-64.
2. Richard Burgess, Greece and the Lecvant, or a Diary of a Summer’s Excursion in 1834, vol. 2 (London: 1835 revised), 272.
3. Alphonse de la Martine, A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land: Comprising Recollections, Sketches, and Reflections Made During a Tour in the East, vol. 2 (New York: 1842), 266-267. The account was originally written in 1832.
4. Ivan Golovin, The Nations of Russia and Turkey and their Destiny (London: 1854), 41.
5. Francis Herve, Esq., “A Residence in Greece and Turkey with Notes on the Journey Through Bulgaria, Servia, Hungary, and the Balkans, in Waldie’s Select Circulating Library, vol. 12 (Philadelpia: 1838), 169.
6. James Henry Skene, The Frontier Lands of the Christian and the Turk, Comprising Travels in the Region of the Lower Danube in the Years 1850 and 1851, vol. 2 (London: 1853), 401.
