The Skull Tower (Serbian: Ћеле Кула, or Ćele Kula) is a monument to 19th century Serbian rebels. It is situated in Niš, on Zoran Đinđić Boulevard, on the old Constantinople road leading to Sofia. On May 31, 1809 on Čegar Hill a few kilometers northeast of Niš, Serbian insurrectionists suffered their greatest defeat in the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottoman Empire (1804-1813). The insurrectionists' advance towards Niš was stopped here and, when the far stronger Turkish forces attacked, the battle was ended by the Serbian commander Stevan Sinđelić, who sacrificially fired at his gunpowder depot in order to avoid surrendering to the Turks, killing himself, the rest of his men, and the advancing Turks.
After the retreat of the Serbian rebel army, the Turkish commander of Niš, Hurshid Pasha, ordered that the heads of the killed Serbians were to be mounted on a tower to serve as a warning to any other would-be revolutionaries. In all, 952 skulls were included, with the skull of Sindjelić placed at the top. The scalps from the skulls were stuffed with cotton and sent to Constantinople (modern Istanbul) as proof for Sultan Mahmud II.
While looking for information about Ćele Kula or The Skull Tower I came across this interesting snippets from some very old books, which I doubt very few people know about.
Pillars of HeadsThese snippets say it all
Uncle Oliver's travels, Persia [by J. Kitto]. By John Kitto, Oliver:
Detail from Pillars of HeadsThey put a whole new meaning to the Five Pillars of Islam
Travels from India to England by James Edward Alexander:
Extracted from
Excursions in the Mediterranean Algiers and Tunis By Grenville Temple:
The above article does not say much about the tower
But here is an account of what really happened
The New York Times February 6 1881
12 comments:
Excellent post!
I'll be posting this at my site later this week or early next week. It will make a good history lesson for my students, many of whom still believe that the problems with Islam began with the founding of the modern nation of Israel.
I will be posting part two in a few days time, as since I made this post at by former blog I have found more towers
Highly instructive post. Looking forward to more.
Amboytimes is in the process of creating a "This Day in Islamic Terrorism" calendar .
This calendar provides a heck of a teachers aid. Counter-jihad bloggers should all consider making their contributions and posting that day's highlights Perhaps even adding the current events postings from TheReligionofPeace.com
Shiva,
I will be posting part two in a few days...
I'll be on the lookout.
BTW, I'm adding a label or two to your post. Hope you don't mind.
I hope that there is more than one blogger at Amboytimes to do this series, because I attempted to do the same thing a few years back, I just could not keep up, because there was to many incidents.
I still have it on hard disk, so maybe I will put some up when the right day comes along
It is a big project, just hope they can keep it up
What you all are doing here is as important as what Robert and company are doing at Jihad Watch, and what the Baron and Dymphna and Fjordman are doing at Gates of Vienna. And in spite of Nancy's raging at LGF, What Brussels Journal (linked in the WSJ) is doing is excellent. I am proud to be a part of this alliance! What you are doing, specifically, stands as a rebuke to the whitewashers, to those history revisionistas and saving historical documentation. Bravo!
Shiva, I'm by myself. I've been working on it off and on for about six months. The idea was to make something similar to the History channel's This Day in History. In fact, the History channel website reports only the most extreme cases of terrorism under the heading of "crime". I find that grossly misleading in both scope and context. ROP does an outstanding job of recording recent events, but I wanted to illustrate that Jihad has not only been about for over 1400 years, but has been actively practiced ever since. POD does a nice job of this, but I discovered this after I started the project. I still think it's a worthy endeavor because it is the first of it's kind in in this particular format.
I like to think that I got pretty good if jaded imagination, yet even if to some extent I find it all this slightly unsurprising, still I don't know what I find more shocking on the whole skull-tower stuff.
The fact that this sort of thing did happen in the past rather then in some 2nd rate movie / anime or the fact that practically anything one can attribute to islam, such as paedophilia, necrophilia and any other type of base grotesque crap such as this is just simply part and parcel of this vile bespoke ideology for humanity’s dregs.
I mean this sort of stuff makes Genghis Khan or Vlad the Impaler look like a cute little critters in comparison.
Well, you can add the genocide of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians by the Turks, which happened before the founding of Israel. The Kurds eagerly helped the Turks to massacre the Armenians.
You can also find countless examples of Islamic cruelty in South Asia, such as the genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by Pakistan. Another example is the cruelty of the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb, who was so proud of his "legacy" that he kept records of his deeds for perpetuity. India put on an exhibit last year about Aurangzeb based on those records and, predictably, the thin-skinned slaves of Allah were outraged by the reminder that they were living a lie. Yet another example: Buddhism was wiped out from its birthplace, India, by Islamic invaders.
Excellent response, Abu Abdullah. You mention historical events and atrocities that are often disregarded or otherwise forgotten in the defense of Muslims. Hell, as I've said several times, it is a crime in Turkey to even mention the Armenian genocide, much less apologize for it.
Great research. It is becoming apparent that history must be looked at with new eyes-as there is much to still uncover to get it right. Most compelling is to reanalyse every culture that took up Islam. The Mongols, Turks, Persians, etc. It is evident today in a way not so previously that they were not acting under their ostensible names, but as "Muslims," and their brutality and various psychosises are directly a result of that.
The Mongols under Genghis Khan perpetrated unspeakable atrocities on their enemies and they were not followers of Islam. This is probably the only example where religion doesn't seemed to have played a part in the cruelty of the invading army.
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