Description of the attraction
Sometimes travelers speak of Niš as a city with a gloomy atmosphere - because of several attractions associated with the events of the wars that took place in Serbia in different centuries. Such gloomy memorials include, for example, the Tower of Skulls of Chele Kula - with its construction, the Turks at the beginning of the 19th century marked one of their victories over the Serbs. They actually embedded almost a thousand skulls into the walls of the tower, of which about fifty remain today. Subsequently, a chapel was built around Chele-Kula.
The events of the Second World War in Nis are reminiscent of the Museum "On the Red Cross" and the memorial park Buban. From 1941 to 1944, the first concentration camp on the territory of present-day Serbia, created by the Nazis, operated in Nis, through the barracks of which several tens of thousands of people passed. There were no crematoria in this camp, so the Nazis covered the bodies of the dead prisoners with slaked lime. Since 1979, "On the Red Cross" is considered a historical monument of exceptional importance. The former barracks now house museum expositions.
Buban Memorial Park is located in the suburb of Trebinje. It was created in the place where concentration camp prisoners were buried during the war, mass executions were carried out. The exact number of those buried here is unknown, since the Nazis at the end of the war carefully tried to destroy the traces of their crimes, but according to preliminary data, the remains of 10-15 thousand prisoners are buried in this land.
Each part of the Buban Memorial Park is a symbol. Even the forest that grows here symbolizes the partisan struggle waged by the inhabitants of Niš. The paths leading to the monument represent the path that the prisoners had to make to escape from the camp and be free. On the territory of the park there is a monument made of white marble with bas-reliefs depicting the suffering of prisoners and carving lines from a poem by the poet Ivan Vuchkovich. Also in the park were installed three stone steles in the form of raised tops of fists - for men, women and children. They symbolize the prisoners executed here. The opening of the monument took place in 1963, on the next anniversary of the liberation of Niš from the Nazi occupation.
