SYMBOL OF SACRIFICE FOR FREEDOM: Duke Sinđelić bravely led 4,000 Serbian heroes to their deaths, and the Turks made Ćele Kula from their skulls! (PHOTO)

Back in 1809, the Serbian people fought for liberation from the Ottoman invaders. The First Serbian Uprising was in its sixth year. For the rebels, capturing Niš meant having a passage to Kosovo and the heart of Old Serbia. Thus, a small hill with an unusual name – Čegar, near this city, became the epicenter of the struggle for freedom.

At the head of the Serbian army, gathered “from pillar to post,” in the trench at Čegar, was Duke Stevan Sinđelić. The Turkish army, significantly more numerous and superior, attacked on May 31, 1809.

The battle raged all day. The Turks charged four times, but Sinđelić’s fighters stubbornly repelled them. However, the invaders eventually began to push back the Serbian army and increasingly entered the trench. The fight with rifles turned into a struggle with rifle butts, knives, grappling, and eye-gouging.

New forces constantly arrived for the Turks, while the Serbian army was alone. In such a situation, Stevan Sinđelić did something no one expected…

It all began and ended with one bullet

Seeing that the battle was lost one way or another, that he was left with few soldiers, and that the Turks were advancing, he fired a bullet into a full gunpowder magazine, blowing up everyone who was in or near the trench at that moment.

The price of victory was enormous – Stevan Sinđelić and all his insurgents died that day. Four thousand Serbs lay on Čegar.

And yet… the final balance was on Sinđelić’s side – for every fallen Serbian soldier, four Turkish soldiers died. In total, about 16,000 invaders who thought they would easily deal with the Serbs near Niš that day.

The Price of Freedom

For the common people, Duke Sinđelić became a symbol of priceless resistance and bravery. For the Turks, a lesson that Serbs are never easy to deal with.

As a warning to future generations, the enemies collected 952 skulls of soldiers who died at Čegar and built them into a tower they erected at the entrance to Niš. They named this morbid monument “Ćele Kula” (Skull Tower).

Years later, returning from Constantinople through what would then be free Serbia, the French poet and academic Alphonse de Lamartine stopped by this unique monument. He then wrote:

“I greeted with my eyes and heart the remains of these brave men, whose severed heads became the cornerstone of their homeland’s independence… Let the Serbs cherish this monument! It will teach their children how much the independence of a nation is worth, showing them at what price their fathers paid for it.”