Turske kule i gradovi u Lici i Krbavi
Turkish towers and cities in Lika and Krbava

Summary/Abstract: Turkish towers, no matter how poorly they have been preserved, are part of our culture, heritage and history, a part of our reality. Their poor preservation is a consequence of negligence, which still goes back to the days of the liberation from the Turkish – Ottoman rule, as part of the national and political indifference over more than 160 years of government and rooted hostility. From the developed mediaeval Croatian regions the Turkish wars brought life to the edge of existence and left a wasted land. These 160 and more years of Ottoman rule and the fears of their protagonists are also testified to by the numerous towers of various aghas and beys of Croatian and Slavic names (!). However, these towers should have been protection for them from the surrounding Muslim population: it seems that at the end of the 17th century it did not help them. These towers also bear witness to how little the Ottoman government cared about this, for them, a remote part of a Sanjak in the Empire. And so Lika developed its own customs and varieties in construction, which were a combination of provincial, local architecture and the same such of the Turks. It was somewhat different from the previous, mediaeval Croatian, but also from those in the mainstream, in neighbouring Bosnia, and even further from those more important, closer to Istanbul. It could be said that the Turkish towers are actually a type of specific rural architecture of these regions – Lika and Krbava.After the liberation of these regions, there followed a gap in construction and design because the previous variant of architecture was abandoned, and the search for new ways was felt, and even a movement towards Croatian mediaeval architecture upon the building of new and the renovation of old sacral structures. Unfortunately, Lika and Krbava were not important for the new authorities in Vienna and Graz, besides militarily. Only a series of new structures and fortifications for the defence of the new borders between the two empires remained. The old, Turkish towers are forgotten…

• Details
• Contents