By Josef Candelario
“I saw a large tower rising in the midst of the plain, as white as Parisian marble… [R]aising my eyes to the monument, I discovered that the walls, which I supposed to be built of marble or white stone, were composed of regular rows of human skulls; these skulls bleached by the rain and sun, and cemented by a little sand and lime, formed entirely the triumphal arch which now sheltered me from the heat of the sun. In some places portions of hair were still hanging and waved, like lichen or moss, with every breath of wind. The mountain breeze, which was then blowing fresh, penetrated the innumerable cavities of the skulls, and sounded like mournful and plaintive sighs.”
These are the words of Alphonse de Lamartine after his encounter with the Chele Kula (Ћеле-кула, Tower of Skulls) in Nis in the early 1830s.
After the heroic but ultimately doomed Battle of Kosovo (1389), the pious Serbian Orthodox people would fall under the Ottoman yoke. But inspired by the faith of their ancestors: great saintly kings, archbishops, warriors, and martyrs, the Orthodox Serbs continued to rise up, only to be crushed again by their overlords.
The Tower of Skulls was built by the Ottomans with the skulls of Orthodox Serb insurgents after such an uprising–a warning to anyone of what awaits those who resisted their tyranny. Despite this, the Christians continued to call upon Christ and refused to convert or accept defeat and after four centuries of captivity, they won their freedom.
In the same way, the devil likes to remind us of our failures. He takes our sins and erects ghoulish towers to keep us from struggling against our passions. He wants us to remain in despair so that he can have dominion over us.
But as the Tower of Skulls now sits in a museum in an independent Serbia, it has been transformed as a reminder of victory. Let us allow Christ to redeem our past, let remember how he took the Cross, a symbol of darkness and death, and transformed it into a symbol of a symbol of light and life.
Let us take this to heart and take the monuments of failure built by the devil, and transform them into our own symbols of victory over death through Christ!
Photographs by: Katerina Mavromatakis
