children, and young boys were raped. Girls were taken to Ottoman camps where, naked, they served the soldiers wine and performed sexual acts. The elderly were lashed until they collapsed. Young peasants were tied by their feet and roasted over a fire, with flies swarming on their open wounds. By sunrise around 900 houses in the community were burning. The rebels lost the last of their held territory upon their defeat by Hafuz Pasha on May 20, 1878. Three columns of chained, captured rebels, numbering 150 people, were led down the dusty Skopje road by Ottoman soldiers drunk on victory and the peasants' rakija. They walked towards Pristina, but most of the rebels died on the way. The soldiers pierced the remained captives' bodies with their bayonets, and left them to die on the road. Surviving rebels hid in the Kozjak and Đerman. Several rebel leaders and their followers managed to escape into Serbia, where they settled in the depopulated counties of Toplica and Vranje, and lived "hungry and humiliated... [while] help and awards were given to serve as pandurs" (policemen). Veljan and Jaćim left their houses, families, and friends, to live lonely, unknown, poor lives in Vranje. Following the uprising, the Ottoman government most notably prohibited the use of the appellation "Serbian". Also, Serbian nationalism in Macedonia was persecuted, while Bulgarian propaganda in the region became more common. Mass migrations from Macedonia into Serbia followed after reprisals, with their former villages being settled by Albanians (such as in Matejche, Otlja, Kosmatec, Murgash and others). Aftermath After the uprising, Serbs in the Vranje region signed a memorandum on joining Serbia. A notable local, Stamenko Stošić Torovela, took the memorandum to Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev, a Russian official and main Bulgarian supporter. Ignatijev, rejecting it, threw the memorandum back in the face of Torovela, who managed to flee across the Bulgarian border from Bulgarian agents who sought to kill him. On 15 June 1878, an assembly was held at Zelenikovo, southeast from Skopje, where 5,000 villagers from the nahiye of Veles, Skopje, and Tikveš, requested unification with Serbia from Prince Milan IV. The request came with 800 municipality, church, and monastery seals, as well as 5,000 signatures, fingerprints, and crosses. Unfortunately, the carrier delivering the message was intercepted on 16 June on the Skopje-Kumanovo road, by an Ottoman gendarmerie that had been tipped off by a Bulgarian teacher. There was a shootout,