Serbia's King Milutin ordered his son blinded, and that son was later deposed by his own son and died in prison at Zvečan in 1331

Stefan Uroš III rebelled against his father, King Milutin, in 1314. He was defeated, blinded and exiled. His Life, as told by the Orthodox Church, says Milutin's wife Simonida convinced the king that his son wanted the throne early, and that guards blinded Stefan with red-hot pokers on the road to Constantinople. Emperor Andronikos housed him in the Pantokrator monastery. Church tradition says Saint Nicholas restored his sight. Milutin pardoned him and brought him home in 1320. Milutin died in 1321, and Stefan won a three-year struggle for the throne. In 1330 he defeated Bulgaria at Velbužd, where Tsar Michael Shishman was killed. He then quarrelled with his own son Dušan. Dušan won, was crowned king, and imprisoned his father in the fortress of Zvečan. Stefan died there in 1331. Accounts say he was hanged or drowned; one Serbian history calls the circumstances mysterious. In 1332 Dušan moved his father's body to Visoki Dečani, the monastery Stefan had founded, and the Church later declared him a martyr. His relics lie in a carved coffin-reliquary beside the iconostasis, which the Austrian Academy of Sciences describes as the only surviving medieval Serbian coffin-reliquary. In 2016 the Constitutional Court of Kosovo confirmed the monastery's ownership of 24 hectares of land. The Kosovo cadastre registered the land to the monastery in March 2024.