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.
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