Unleashing the anger against those who had organized the insurgence against the sultan, the Ottoman commander of the city, Hurshid Pasha, ordered his soldiers to cut off the heads of the Serbian soldiers fallen at Čegar and to bring them to Niš.
Chroniclers who described this event say that the Pasha payed 25 groats for each head, and Sinđelić’s head was impaled on a spike and triumphantly brought into the Fortress. Then, the Turks gathered all skinners from the city and ordered them,under threat of death,to skin the heads of all the Serbian soldiers. The skins were filled with straw and sent to the sultan in Constantinople, and the Turks started to build the tower out of the skulls.
In order to terrify the Serbian people, the Pasha ordered the tower to be built on the road to Constantinople, two kilometers from the Fortress. The construction of the tower lasted for several days. They had to build in 17 skulls in fourteen rows on the four sides of the tower, 952 skulls in total. The anger and mercilessness of the Ottoman Pasha is shown in the fact that at the end of the construction, just in order to fill the last row, he ordered 30 Serbian captives to be killed, and their heads were built in the tower without skinning. The sight was terrifying, but the effect was the opposite of what was expected, and the Skull Tower has become a symbol of resistance and struggle for freedom.
Ćele-kula in Serbian, and the Skull Tower in English is a unique monument in the world, visited by more than 30.000 people each year. There are 58 preserved skulls which still illustrate all the horror of the original tower. It is believed that most of the skulls were taken down by relatives of the killed insurgents, while a number of the skulls were taken by numerous West European scholars, diplomats and travelers, who passed through Niš on their journeys and stopped at this witness of Ottoman retribution.
