Public display of bodies
Regardless of the mode of execution, until 1858 the bodies of executed criminals in Serbia were almost always publicly displayed on wheels or on „hangers“ (visilica).
The wheel, in all respects like an ordinary cart-wheel, was made specially for each execution. According to a contemporary description: „Together with the wheel, they make a wooden pole of just over one hvat (= 1.9 meters) in length, with a pointed tip just like a spit roast. The pole is fixed in the ground and the wheel is fitted to it so that the pointed end of the pole protrudes some 40 centimetres above the wheel. After the prisoner is executed, he is raised onto the wheel and impaled, face up, on the pointed end of the pole. The body stays like that for a number of weeks or until it is decomposed, after which it is taken down and buried“. In order to facilitate the impalement, the body would first be pierced with a sword.
The hanger is a rope or a chain used to hang the executed body to a tree or a tall pole for display. Similar practices were in use in many European countries until the first decades of the 19th century. For example, in England the bodies were gibbeted, i.e. hanged in iron cages (to prevent thefts by relatives or medics, who used them for anatomy lessons). In 1812, more than hundred thousand people gathered in Wimbledon to watch the gibbeting of a criminal.
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The practice persisted much longer in the Ottoman Empire. The blind Englishman Holman, arriving to Belgrade from Bosnia in 1844, reported that „from Sarajevo to the frontiers of Serbia was nearly all forest, with here and there the skeletons of robbers hung up in chains“.[1]
For how long the bodies remained on display was determined by the sentence of the court. For example, the judgments of Serbian courts from 1828 and 1829 include the following stipulations: one murderer was to be shot and then „hanged with a rope by the road“ for seven days; another was to „hang on a three for a week“; a third was to be „put on a hanger as an example to the people“ and buried after one month; a fourth was to be put on a wheel and stay there „until fully decomposed“. It was strictly forbidden to take the corpse down and bury it: whosoever did this could end up in its place.
As executions took place in places frequented by the public, such as crossroads, the wheels were highly visible and a nuisance to a growing number of people. The peasants complained that the stench of rotting bodies made it impossible to work in the nearby fields. Inhabitants of a village in Šumadija petitioned the authorities in 1837 for prmission to take down the decomposed body of a robber so that „our children would not live in fear any more“. Travelling in Serbia in January 1848, Prince Alexander saw a wheel on which a thief's body had been rotting „since last Fall“ and ordered it to be taken down and buried. The practice of displaying the bodies of executed criminals was causing a growing resistance in the public, so that in August 1858 it was decreed that after execution bodies were to be „buried into the ground immediately“, which effectively ended the displays.
Nonetheless, a custom of publicly displaying the dead bodies (or only the severed heads) of brigands killed by posses survived in Serbia much longer – until the 1930s.