On the right bank of the Sava in Šabac, there is a fortress built in 1471 by Isa beg Isaković and named Bigir Delen, which means “side piercer”. The fortress was called by various names: Zaslon, Zaklon, Kule, Sava, Bugur tlen, but it is best known as Šabac Fortress. The name Šabac is first mentioned by Antonio Bonfini, a Hungarian court historian who thought it was a Turkish word and meant something that was miraculously beautiful.

There is no information on what the first fortress on the bank of the Sava, around which today’s Šabac was founded, looked like. In the ancient period when Sirmijum, today’s Sremska Mitrovica, was the capital of the province of Pannonia, the settlement on the Sava near Šabac could have been a river port and a castle for communication with Sirmijum. Whether the fortress was built on the foundations of some other building has not yet been proven. In the 19th century, the travel writer Felix Kanic was one of those who believe that the Šabac fortress was built on the foundations of a Roman castle. He wrote about the place on the bank of the river and the fortress that he personally saw: „The settlement of Zaslon, in which only Christians always lived, and the latter Šabac, was created on a terrain whose altitude is about 85 m, and it was separated from the fortified Muslim “Sebadža” by a spacious and swampy “Šabačko polje”. The fortress itself, which lay in the center of the enclosure, retained not only the foundation of the Roman castle, on which Sultan Mehmed built it in 1471, despite attempts by the Hungarians to prevent it, but also a significant part of the roof building material of Roman origin. obvious. It was a quadrangle that deviated from the geometric regularity on the northeast side, with protruding round towers at the corners and a palisade rampart.”.

Šabac Fortress is very reminiscent of Fetislam and Zemun, Turkish fortifications on the Danube, with a quadrangular base and round towers. Numerous drawings, woodcuts, copper engravings, lithographs and old maps speak about the appearance of the Šabac Fortress. On the map from 1562, the fortress is mentioned for the last time under the name Zaslon. Six years later, on the first topographic map of Hungary made by Lazar, secretary of the Ostrogothic archbishop Toma, published in Ingolstadt in 1528, Šabac is inscribed on the Sava under its present name.

The oldest known drawing of the Šabac fortress is a woodcut, whose picture was given in the Hartmann-Schedel World Chronicle in 1493. We are informed about this by the book by Karl Schuhardt, in which he writes: „How much the way of fortifying the royal castle lasted through the Middle Ages is shown by the fortress Sabac on the Sava, provided by Hartmann Schedel’s World Chronicle from the year 1493. It makes an impression as a kind of reconstruction of the Dorestad plan: In the interior, an elongated rectangle is divided into larger and smaller courtyards. Outside, there is an empty space around the city wall, and everything is made of wood. Instead of a wall, the fence is made of wicker everywhere. Only many of the round towers at the corners, which are a medieval addition, appear to be made of stone.”.

Like many other fortresses, the Šabac Fortress was primarily built as a defensive fortification in the event of an enemy attack. Five years after the Turks built it, the Hungarian king Matija Korvin conquered the Šabac fortress and turned it into an important defensive point of Hungary against the Ottomans. However, the battles around Šabac, Belgrade and Avala were fought until 1521, when the Ottoman army occupied first Belgrade, and then the Šabac Fortress and its entire crew. On that occasion, Sultan Suleiman II said: “It is one of the cities I have conquered. It needs to be promoted.”.

The Sultan’s order was carried out, and the Sultan personally ordered and supervised the works. An internal fortification was erected and a pontoon bridge over the Sava was built. The appearance of such a fortified Šabac is shown by a copper engraving by Jovan Landrart from the second half of the 17th century. Until the first Serbian uprising, the Šabac Fortress was alternately Austrian and Turkish. The city at that time had two parts: a stone and an outer earthen city, fortified with trenches and palisades. Karadjordj’s insurgents conquered it in 1807, but after six years, the Turkish crew returned to the fortress and stayed there for 54 years. At the beginning of the 20th century, due to the explosion of gunpowder, the Šabac fortress was ruined and badly damaged.

The name of the Romanian duke Vlad Cepeš, better known in history as Count Dracula, who became famous in the battles for liberation from the Turks, is associated with the Šabac fortress. Although known as a great hero, Duke Cepeš ended up in the prison of King Matija Korvin because of his cruelty and great resentment towards the Turks. In addition to Vlad Cepeš, Vuk Gregurović, better known as the Zmaj Ognjeni Vuk, was in Korvin’s army. There are still stories and legends among the people that the Romanian duke Cepeš, in the fortress in Šabac, impaled a thousand Turks and let them cross the Sava. When he returned to Romania, he was killed the same year. His decapitated body was buried in a monastery on the island of Snagov, while his head was handed over to Sultan Mehmed II. As the legend says: the restless spirit of Vlad Cepeš is still wandering the battlefield and the fortress on the Sava. Šabac Fortress is a cultural monument of great importance. Renovated and renovated is a trademark of Šabac. In its centuries-old walls, on the banks of the Sava, various cultural events, festivals and manifestations take place in order to promote Šabac, its traditions and culture.

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