The Skull Tower of Niš, Serbia

In the city of Niš, in the heart of the Balkan Peninsula, stands a macabre monument to the Serbian resistance against the Ottoman's 400-year rule. But it was built not to celebrate or commemorate the heroic sacrifices of thousands of resistance fighters who lost their lives, but to strike fear in their very hearts. The Serbian Empire fell to the Ottomans in the late 14th century, but the writing was on the wall for a long time. The Empire was crumbling under Stefan Uroš V, whose indecisiveness and incompetence had earned him the disgraceful title of “Uros the Weak”. Internal conflicts had fragmented the empire into a number of principalities, some of which did not even nominally acknowledge his rule. At the same time, the Ottoman sultanate was gradually spreading across Asia and Europe. When the powerful Ottomans attacked, the Serbian provincial lords, too absorbed with their own enmity, offered little resistance. Photo: asiana/Shutterstock.com The city of Niš was captured for the first time by the Ottoman Turks in 1375. The Serbs managed to get it back in 1443, but it fell again in 1448. The city changed hands a few more times between the Turks and the Austrians during the 17th and 18th centuries, but for the greater part of the next 400 years since the city fell, it was under the famously brutal Ottomans. During this era, the Serbs suffered untold misery as chronicled by travelers passing through the region. A 16th century Silesian traveler described grisly scenes of mutilated corpses littered along the route from Sofia to Niš. When he reached the gates of Niš, he saw that it was bedecked with freshly-severed heads of poor Bulgarian peasants. The first full-scale war between the Serbians and the Ottomans took place in 1805, in the Battle of Ivankovac, where the Serbs defeated the Turks and forced them to retreat toward Niš.