A tower built out of the skulls of immortal heroes of the battle of Čegar. It is a memento

to humanity, to sublime ideals and unprecedented cruelty, to the spirit of freedom in tormented

enslaved people, to the vandalism of vanquishers. An everlasting memory to be kept by the

mankind. The story began long ago, in 1809, when the poles around the Čegar trenches gave

in, when yataghans and knives flashed, when the breath of far more superior enemy was felt.

The commandant, Stevan Sindjelić from Resava, waited until the Turks entered the trenches,

then went down to the armory, fired into a powder-barrel and the whole trench blew up.

Stevan Sindjelić and all his combatants were killed, but the explosion also killed a great number

of Turkish soldiers. The Turks could not forget, nor forgive it. So they assembled a tower of

the skulls of dead Serbs, a tower three-meter high, rectangular, masoned in unslaked lime and sand.

Each side of the tower contained 14 lines of 17 openings for the skulls. Once 950 in number, less

than 60 skulls remained nowadays. The main purpose of the Turkish vanquisher was to intimidate

only the Serbs. Having built it next to the road to Constantinople, aimed to be clearly visible

and threatening, the Osmanli power wanted to put in fear all the dominated nations. Being

unique in form and universal in message it conveys, the tower may well be included in the world

cultural heritage. It had been unprotected and exposed to deterioration due to the weather

conditions up to the year 1892, when it was covered by a chapel according to the design of

the architect Dimitrije Leka. Ćele Kula, resulting from the mythical courage of Stevan Sindjelić,

has been preserved for the generations to come.

This is a skull of Stevan Sindjelic.