Nis Travel Guide

The Nis Fortress is one of the best-preserved Ottoman fortresses in Serbia, but its value is less in the walls than in the archaeological section stacked underneath them. The stone walls standing today were built between 1719 and 1730 as an Ottoman strongpoint on the road through the Balkans to Central Europe. But the fortification here is far older than that: excavation inside has exposed Roman baths, a Byzantine church and an Ottoman hammam in the same section. The city was ancient Naissus, birthplace of Constantine the Great, so this cannot be read as an Ottoman monument alone. The best thing inside is the well-preserved Ottoman hammam, now a lapidarium holding Roman tombstone sculpture. The old arsenal, once a store for cannon and gunpowder, is now an exhibition space, and the Bali-Beg Mosque has become Salon 77, a contemporary art venue run by the Nis art gallery. Standing in an Ottoman fortress looking at contemporary art is a fair summary of how this city works. The green grounds are the city's real public space: shaded open-air cafe tables stay busy on summer evenings, and the Nisville jazz festival, held inside the fortress each August, is one of the most respected jazz events in the Balkans. If you catch it, the fortress is a stage all night and nothing like the daytime site. For photographs, walk the eastern ramparts in the golden hour for a view over the Nisava and the city. One thing to note: the fortress, the Skull Tower and the Mediana Roman estate are three separate sites with separate tickets and hours, all managed by the National Museum Nis and all closed on Mondays, so plan around that. In short: free, open around the clock, and the best place to read the layers of Nis. It belongs at the start of any Nis itinerary.

The Skull Tower, Cele Kula, is the heaviest site in Nis and the most direct confrontation with death in the Balkans. In May 1809 Serbian insurgents fought the Ottomans at Cegar Hill, about six kilometres from Nis. With ammunition nearly spent, their commander Stevan Sindjelic detonated the gunpowder magazine rather than surrender, and the force died where it stood. Afterwards the Ottoman commander Hurshid Pasha ordered the skulls of the fallen to be built into a tower as a warning to the population not to rebel again. The original tower held 952 skulls. The tower did not achieve its purpose. In Serbian national memory it became a symbol of resistance rather than a model of fear. In 1833 the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine visited and wrote the words still displayed on the wall of the museum: let the Serbs keep this monument, and it will always teach their children at what price a people's independence is bought. The tower is now enclosed in a small chapel, added in the late nineteenth century to protect what remains. Sources put the surviving skulls at 58 to 59, most set into the upper courses of the tower and visible at close range. A small museum beside it explains the 1809 uprising in trilingual panels, Serbian, English and French, and the monument draws more than 30,000 visitors a year. This is not a sight but a funerary memorial. Photography inside the chapel is restricted and permission should be asked at the door; dress and behaviour should be respectful and voices kept low. The chapel is narrow, so large backpacks are a bad idea. Cegar Hill itself, where the battle was fought, is a separate site with a monument and a view over the Nis valley, and a good place to understand the fight; but it is not the same place as the tower. The one thing to check before going is Monday: the site is closed, and walking or driving out only finds a locked gate.

The Red Cross camp, Crveni Krst, is the only fully preserved Nazi concentration camp site in Serbia and one of the best-preserved fascist detention camps in Europe. The German Gestapo converted former military barracks here in 1941, making it one of the earliest camps in occupied Yugoslavia, and it operated until 1944. Prisoners included Serbs, Roma, Jews, communists and supporters of the liberation movement. More than 35,000 people were held, and about 10,000 were killed at Bubanj Hill on the southwest outskirts — the camp was not the end, inmates were regularly taken out there for execution. Its best-known event is the escape of 12 February 1942, the first successful mass breakout from a Nazi concentration camp on European soil. Organised by Branko Bjegovic, a captured Partisan soldier, 147 inmates attempted the flight, 105 got out and 82 died along the way. The Nazis responded with indiscriminate executions as collective punishment, and from then on the camp became a place of death in earnest. A memorial museum opened on the site in 1967, the grounds were declared a cultural monument of exceptional importance in 1979, and it now belongs to the National Museum of Nis under the formal name Museum 12 February. Only the main building, No 12, is open. Three storeys: the first and second hold collective detention rooms that once crammed hundreds of people into a few square metres, with names and dates carved into the walls by inmates still legible; the third floor holds solitary and punishment cells floored entirely with barbed wire, designed to deny any space to sit or lie and to produce total sleep deprivation. The administrative block is currently closed. There are no official tours and very few staff, so visitors walk the route on their own; most panels have English translations. The air is damp and uninsulated, and the interior is markedly cold in winter, a physical condition that is itself part of the display. If you have the stamina, Bubanj Memorial Park is about forty minutes on foot, and its Three Fists concrete monoliths close the narrative that starts in the camp.