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Tourists trickle down into the bowels of Belgrade’s monumental fortress, attracted by banners promising a “MEDIEVAL TORTURE MUSEUM.” A $5 entrance fee secures access to three dusty, gloomy rooms, tucked away in the battlements alongside a range of other money-spinning ventures.
The sounds of axes chopping and muffled screams are piped through the catacombs, creating a slightly cheesy, slightly unsettling atmosphere. Dusty cases present a confused mix of artifacts of dubious historical origin, glorying in lurid names. The “pear of anguish” is an expanding corkscrew supposedly inserted into a liar’s mouth or a sodomite’s rectum; the “flute of shame,” an iron device purportedly intended to restrain tuneless musicians’ fingers. Often, explanatory labels speak of “gaolers” and “torturers” without making it clear when or where these nefarious villains operated, or else reveal these devices were actually popularized centuries after the actual medieval era, which historians date from roughly 500 to 1500.
You’ve likely seen or visited a similar museum, peddling dumb, gory, rainy-day fun. A group of young visitors hanging out in front of Belgrade’s iron maiden have previously visited similar exhibits in Brussels, Prague, and a tiny one-room version in their native Romania. “I want to put my friend in the machine, he can sleep there tonight,” jokes visitor Stefan Ionescu, pointing at the gruesome, nail-studded coffin. But he then turns serious: “This museum shows what humans were capable of in the past.”
But does it? Across the past two decades, dozens of these tourist traps have popped up throughout European tourist hotspots—and even as far afield as Hollywood and Mexico City, in countries with no connection to Europe’s medieval past. Where did these museums come from? What’s the basis of their dubious, exaggerated depictions of violence in the medieval past? And why are they so popular today?
As you might suspect, the devices on display often aren’t actually medieval at all. As Albrecht Classen, a professor in the University of Arizona’s German Studies department, explains, many of the supposedly ancient, ironwork torture implements now found in near-identical copies across European capitals were originally created centuries later to feed Victorian England’s appetite for tales of medieval gore and brutality.
“Most of these ‘gadgets’ were produced by British blacksmiths during the 19th century. It was a booming business,” he says. And in fact, items like the Belgrade museum’s “frocks of penance” are clearly of even more recent origin, machine-stitched out of mass-produced sacking, though no sign makes it explicit they’re replicas.
Modern audiences share an interest in gruesome storytelling with their Victorian counterparts. Surrey University’s James Kennell, who has researched the growing popularity of “dark tourism,” says the copycat contemporary museums likely developed to spice up more traditional tourist hotspots like Prague Castle or Belgrade’s fortress.
“Everyone’s desperate to get younger visitors in, everyone’s seeking something new,” he says. “Whenever you’re at a castle, a stately home, or other ‘heritage’ site, you always see people crowding around anything with a dark or military purpose.” Little wonder that local entrepreneurs started gathering whatever torture implements they could purchase at flea markets or knock up in a carpentry shop—without bothering to check the history books first.
While brutal devices like the rack and thumbscrews certainly were used to extract information and confessions at points in history, in these museums then truth and fiction, ancient and modern mingle in a confusing mix. For example, the iron maiden is a 19th-century myth, so lethal as to be useless for torture purposes. The “Judas cradle,” said to suspend the unlucky victim butt-first over a pointy pyramid, is every bit as impractical—and never really existed either. The original pear of anguish might actually have been a sock-stretcher.
This kind of morbid thrill-seeking dates back even further than the Victorian era. Medieval audiences themselves might have experienced a similar thrill at macabre cathedral art, like the graphic depictions of hell in Rouen’s Gothic Church of Saint Maclou, according to Classen. “Through these scenes of hell, presented as part of Christian teaching… all other horrors could be imagined.”
But there’s also a particular, recent rise in dark tourism contributing to the proliferation of torture museums. Kennell’s research suggests their popularity could be explained by a growing distance from death in our everyday lives. In Western cultures where most of us no longer face daily risk of torture or violence, “these museums offer same sort of [experience] as watching scary movies or going on roller-coasters… [they] help us learn how to manage our fear of death.” The true-crime wave and the spectacle of holiday-makers lounging on beaches reading Nordic noir literature that often depicts extreme sexual violence offer similar contemporary phenomena, Kennell says.
What’s particular to the medieval torture museums is the historic framing. By painting a broad-brush picture of the “medieval” past as a time of uniformly horrific violence, they help us feed our own appetite for violence while reassuring us that we ourselves are immune to such inhumanity, and giving our guilty fascination an academic sheen. “One of the most attractive parts of human life is to reflect on the horrendous, beastly, violent, aggressive part within human beings,” Classen says. “But don’t fall into the trap [of thinking] that we are more civilized than in the past!”
In particular, these exhibitions are marked by a telling focus on sexual violence against women and homosexuals, contributing to what Chloe Ingersent, a feminist historian of early modern England at Oxford University, calls the trivialization of sexual violence. “‘Medieval’ is now itself a synonym for brutality,” she explains. “So putting torture in a ‘medieval’ museum offers us the chance to consign violence to the past and celebrate our own, modern, enlightenment.” Devices like the scold’s bridle, an iron gag used to silence nagging women, were actually used in the past, but when we view them solely through the ‘medieval’ prism, it’s easy to overlook the violence that women still face today.
For example, Classen’s area of expertise is the infamous chastity belt, a device supposedly used to restrain wives from infidelity while their husbands went away to war. He’s written the definitive book on the subject, which makes it clear that the devices were a myth made up by ancient satirists as a way to mock cuckolded husbands.
“It was a motif from throughout the Middle Ages, until modern times—laughing about husbands who can’t control lustful wives,” he says. “It’s a reflection of a sexual inferiority complex.” Chastity belts only started being presented as genuine history in a Victorian era keen to distance itself from the salacious past.
With that in mind, it’s certainly always worth seeking out museums that take the past more seriously, treating torture as a political and social phenomenon. The Tower of London, for example, expertly documents the particular torture that occurred on that specific site, rather than mixing together random, dubious splatters of gore from throughout millennia of complex history.
Still, Kennell says we shouldn’t feel too bad about enjoying the spectacle: “Some tourism should just be fun! It’s an opportunity to have an escapist experience. But what you lose in that is the possibility for education and real learning.”
For even if the history is suspect, a lurid fascination with violence is always going to be with us. “My mom wouldn’t let me visit,” admits Dušan Zifkov, 17, visiting the Belgrade museum from Canada. “So I got my uncle to take me instead.”