Muselim’s Lodgings

Today, it is the only building on the left bank of the river Kolubara dating back to the Ottoman Empire. It is the oldest preserved building in Valjevo and a rare remnant of the Turkish masonry. At the beginning of 1804, when the Turks used the most drastic measures to eradicate each idea of the uprising, Serbian dukes Aleksa Nenadović and Ilija Birčanin were imprisoned in the basement of the Lodgings.

They were decapitated on February 4th and their heads were publicly displayed on the roof of this building. In those days all around Serbia, several dozens of prominent people were slaughtered, but because of their respectability and the role they played in the pre uprising days, Aleksa and Ilija became the symbols of the the Slaughter of the Knezes, and Muselim’s Lodgings has been remembered in the Serbian people’s tradition as the place where after the last night of the Knezes, the dawn of freedom broke.

The exhibition The Slaughter of the Knezes is displayed in the basement of the Lodging, in which knezes Aleksa Nenadović and Ilija Birčanin were imprisoned before execution, contains two exhibition bases, ambiental reconstruction of a Turkish prison cell, as a base for museum presentation of the basic historical topic not illustrated by original objects but with a variety of materials from illustrations, through models an replicas to figures.

Museum exhibition in which the original museum artifacts are displayed and which is called Valjevo nahia and people in the First and Second Serbian Uprising is displayed in the basement of the Lodgings and its aim is to fully portray the  historical process which they participated in and witnessed.