Niš Serbia

 

Behind me is a tower that the ottomans built  from the actual skulls of their enemies ,right now I'm in Serbia and in this post I'm gonna give you a tour of Niš a historic city on the crossroad  of eastern Europe and the Middle East.

 

It's 2pm right now in Niš Serbia  interesting thing is that Niš used to be a very important stop for hippies on their way to Istanbul in  the 60s and 70s and it still is an important stop for travelers like me who like to explore  this region. it's a pretty historical place but I want to start off the vlog by talking about  probably my second favorite thing about Serbia the food.

 

Serbian food or Balkan food in general  is just freaking amazing and Niš is famous for having some of the best food in Serbia and I  haven't eaten anything today despite it being 2pm  

 

so I'm going to start the day  off with some burek (shopkeeper's grandson told me to get the cheese burek because that's Niš's speciality) I just got the traditional Niš burek and some  yogurt which cost 150 dinars which is exactly $1.5 .it just went from being completely rainy to  super sunny all of a sudden and I'm about to try some burek  in this place called trg kralja milana  from my two months in Belgrade I know that trg means square and kralja means king. I guess the square  was dedicated to some king and it seems like  

 

this is the main square of Niš. So burek is this  heavy greasy pastry with lots of different layers .it can be made from cheese or it can be  made from minced meat with beef pork and ham .i just got the traditional Niš burek which  I think is made mostly from cheese and this is very hard to eat if you can tell from the surface  it is very prone to falling apart. now there is no way to not make a mess. you just gotta eat it  make sure you have enough napkins when you get it real cheesy real good really good hangover food  for anyone wondering that's how i discovered  burek in Slovenia three years ago when i  was pretty hungover after a night.  

 

out in Ljubljana and my life was never the  same again. one more very important thing ,when you get your burek get some yogurt  with it too. the best combination ever burek and yogurt. all right need to finish  this up and catch a bus to the next spot, so Niš is a crossroad between  eastern Europe and the middle east and it's less than 250 kilometers away from  Belgrade, Sofia and Skopje, respective capitals of Serbia, Bulgaria and Macedonia so you can see why  this location has always been a strategic place to have an important city and a lot  of really famous roman emperors were actually born in Niš but none more famous  than Constantine the great who was born right here  

 

so right now i am in Mediana which is like 4.5  kilometers from the east of the center of Niš and you can take a quick bus and get here  this is where Constantine the great was born unfortunately this whole area has been closed  for a couple of years but you can still kind of come out to the side and see the buildings  where he was raised if you need a quick history recap Constantine the great is probably one of  the greatest kings in history, ruled one of the biggest empires in history, founded the city of  Constantinople as the center of the byzantine empire and effectively founded the byzantine  empire 1700 years ago. if you want to know more about that just go back and watch my history  vlog from Istanbul.

 

so clearly a lot of history  has happened here in Niš under many different  empires but throughout history the kingdom of Serbia emerged time and time again as its own  identity until about 1385 when it fell to the ottomans who took over the whole region and it was  conquered by the ottomans for the next 400 years

 

so right now I'm on the grounds of Niš  fortress  so the Ottomans built a lot of very important structures when they're occupying niche but  none are more prominent or more important than the Niš  fortress which was built around  300 years ago behind me is this mosque that was also built by the ottomans. so one important thing  to note about this whole fortress complex is that the ottomans didn't build it out of nowhere it was  built on top of fortifications that were built by the romans and the Byzantines and then by medieval  people after them so unlike a lot of the more famous fortresses around Europe, Niš fortress  doesn't really have a big tall building in the  center as you can see.

 

it's mostly just ruins of all  the different buildings that the ottomans built during their occupation. the ottoman occupation  finally ended in 1878 when Niš was liberated and became a part of Serbia but unfortunately  that was not the last time Serbia was occupied or a tragedy happened because of  this occupation and the most daunting reminder to the next period of occupation let's say is only  like a 10 minute walk from here right over there.

 

so what you're seeing behind me that's the  gate to the red cross Nazi uh concentration camp it's raining a little bit right now  but I just wanted to recap on what i saw quick history lesson: back in 1941 Hitler and  Nazi Germany invaded Serbia the same way they had invaded a number of other countries in Europe  like anywhere else in Europe they were starting to wipe out the Jews that lived in Serbia at that point  and the Romanis and anyone that was considered an enemy of the state or basically anyone who  didn't fit Hitler's idea of what was the perfect race. It included gay people, it included mentally  disabled people and whatnot but mostly Jews.  

 

Jews were the biggest group that was persecuted  under Hitler. there were 9 million Jews in Europe at the start of world war 2. There were 3 million  left alive by the end of it. This one was actually the first concentration camp in what was the  kingdom of Yugoslavia and it held up to 35 000 people total so a lot of the other concentration  camps that the Nazis had throughout Europe they often completely destroyed any signs of it before  they left. I've been to Auschwitz three times and there isn't much left of Birkenau which was the  biggest killing camp but this one's very well preserved. You can still go in and see the rooms in  which the prisoners were held, you can go and see the actual prison cells in which a lot of people  were held you can read about the victims and their lives. You know I was afraid to talk about recent  genocide sin my previous videos because of   

 

i was really afraid of accidentally saying a  wrong fact and just making a mistake about that but this stuff is something I read about a lot  and I study a lot. I'm not gonna not talk about places like this when I do videos anymore  I'm not gonna not talk about the ugly side of the cities because you can't just talk about a city or  a place and remember the good things that happened there you have to remember the ugly things that  happened to otherwise it's not fair to the people. 

 

who perished in these terrible times. This was  not actually one of the concentration camps that was primarily used for extermination. It was not  an extermination camp. People were held here and from here they were taken on to the next location  Bubanj hill which is not too far away from here so around four kilometers away from the red cross  concentration camp is this hill called Bubanj hill and there's this park called Bubanj memorial park  today it looks like just like any other park there are people running around with their  dogs playing with their kids throwing a frisbee around but this place has a much darker history  so out of the 35 000 people that were staying in the red cross concentration camp most of them  ended up getting moved to other camps like Dacao in Germany but 10 000 of them suffered a different  kind of fate. They were brought to these hills in vans usually in the middle of  the night then the Nazi soldiers made them stand in lines of ten facing away  from the officers and they were all shot in the head and then they were dropped off and  bulldozed trenches that were made on this hill  

 

no one really even knows the exact number of  people that have died it's estimated to be between 10 thousand to twelve thousand but it's  probably higher because there's probably bodies that have still not be discovered in this hill  whenever you think about the holocaust and the atrocities like the ones that happened right on  the site, we often wonder how could people do this how could anyone be persecuted like that but the  truth of the matter is, that kind of persecution is  

 

still going on. Genocide following the same exact  methods have happened in this subcontinent a few hundred kilometers from where I am within my  lifetime (Srebrenica). Ironically the second largest group that were killed during the  holocaust, the gypsies or the Romanis are still probably the most persecuted people  in eastern Europe. A couple of years ago I was in Macedonia or northern Macedonia now and i was  drinking by the river with my friends and there were a couple of Romanis and this woman in her 30s  who was pregnant, a Romani woman, she had a heart attack in front of us and collapsed. Thankfully I  was with a friend she's British where she spoke a little Serbian, we were able to figure out what was  happening and we're trying to call an ambulance and they (her kids) didn't let us call an ambulance and  they just called another friend of theirs gave us the number of someone they know who  came and took care of them. they didn't call an ambulance because they were afraid they  would be  deported or put somewhere else  

 

if they ended up in hospital because they  needed to be there for a heart attack  now i don't know the exact history of everyone in  this region and the reasons why people end up in places like that but you got to ask yourselves: how can anyone deserve to have a life like that? what could anyone have done to be persecuted on  that level that you're afraid to go to a hospital in the place you live after getting a freaking  heart attack. it's insane. it's insane. we like to think that all of this stuff: the genocide,  the persecution, the ethnic cleansing is over in the world but it's definitely not  there's definitely more work we got to do as human beings

 

now for a big change of scenery we're back in the  city center in this place called tinker's alley this is where copper smiths  and metal workers used to work back in the day but now it's more of a  place with a lot of bars a lot of good music it's actually where i've gone out for the last two  nights but now I'm just looking for some good food,so this right here is called a pljeskavica, the best  food I've had in Serbia and probably one of the better foods I've had in my life. it's basically  one of the Serbian national dishes. the meat is the spicy mixture of beef, lamb and pork. I eat  pljeskavica literally on average more than once a day because I eat it for lunch every day and  then sometimes when i go out at night I'll eat  ,it again in the middle of the night after coming  back from the bars. it's just the best thing ever in Belgrade i thought it was cheap where  i could get like you know normal sized "mala" pljeskavica which means small but  it's not really that small for 150 dinars  

 

which is like exactly one dollar fifty cents  but over here you can get the same thing for 90 cents or 90 dinners. I just got like a  larger burger which cost $1.60 .you can never go wrong with pljeskavica. so now  for a little bit of a change of scenery again .we're gonna go to one of the  more fascinating attractions in Niš which is very unique to Niš and  I've never heard of anything like that before

 

so this place has a really crazy story  back in 1809 all of Serbia was occupied by the ottomans and there was an uprising by the  Serbian rebels to gain independence and at one point the commander was surrounded  and outnumbered by the Turkish/Ottoman troops and they decided that because they were probably  going to die and get impaled anyways ,if they got captured, they were just going to blow  the whole place up so they blew themselves up and they blew up all the ottoman forces around them  so the ottomans were obviously very mad at this act of rebellion and in order to send  like a barbaric message to anyone who's going to rebel, they ordered the heads of everyone  who died the Serbian rebels to be chopped off and put on this tower for display for everyone  and you know ironically the thing that was  

 

supposed to scare the Serbs almost became like  a symbol of independence and sacrifice for them and it's still something that is celebrated so  they built this other building around it in 1892 to preserve it and to protect it as a symbol  of Serbian resilience in the face of ottoman occupation. So this place originally had more  than 950 skulls when it was built but a lot of the skulls were buried or taken away by  the family members of the people who died  

                                                                                         The Skull Tower

Right now there are I think 51 skulls still left  here and it's still still pretty fascinating I've never seen anything like this before. this is  so cool: kind of creepy but still pretty cool okay guys so after about 40 kilometers of  walking in the last two days I'm gonna end the blog here by the Nišava river which is the  main river that sort of goes through the city center by the fortress and this is actually a  really good place to meet other young people in the evenings on weekends.

 

On Sundays it's more  like a family crowd here right now. just gonna finish it up here and then head back to  Belgrade where I should see you for the next blog. Definitely planning a vlog from there  Pretty excited to finally have a blog out from  Serbia after spending so much time here. Now if  you want to follow my adventures in more real time  and get more real-time updates on the  things I'm doing the cool places.

I'll catch you guys from the next one