Çengel
Çengel means “hook” in Turkish. It is also an apparatus for executions, consisting of two tall poles, connected by two horizontal bars – the lower may be four and the upper eight meters above the ground. Sharp iron hooks over one meter long, are fixed to the lower bar, usually in pairs. The convict, with arms and legs tied behind his/her back, is hoisted with a rope to the upper bar above the hooks. The rope is then released and the convict falls on the hooks and remains there, pierced haphazardly, to die (if he had not done so on impact) and rot. This mode of execution is shown in a 1620 drawing [1]:
A simplified method, used in Bosnia until the mid-nineteenth century, was to stick a hook under the convict’s ribs and hang him to a pole or a tree. According to a description dating from the second half of the 19th century:[2]
[Çengel] is a sharp iron hook, tied to a rope. If a person was sentenced to this horror, they would stick a hook in his ribs and then hang him to a pole or a tree branch, where the unfortunate would hang for a long time, until he died and the corpse started to decay, attracting with its unpleasant smell ravens and other birds that eat such organic waste.
This form of punishment was not used in Serbia after 1815.
[2] Martin Gjurgjevi, Memoari sa Balkana 1858–1878, Sarajevo: Vogler, 1910, str. 17.