Two weekends ago, we were in Paris. It was a whirwind tour, so there’s a lot to say about it. But a quick post and some pics on one of the less widely known Parisian attractions: the catacombs.
"Stop! Here is the Empire of the Dead."
Unlike the catacombs of Rome, the Parisian catacombs are relatively recent. (As in, roughly as old as the United States, rather than roughly as old as Christianity.) They were established at the end of the Eighteenth Century, as Paris’s cemeteries were overflowing, leading to incredible problems with disease and nastiness. They fixed the problem by disinterring all 6 million bodies in the Parisian cemeteries and moving them to abandoned (and hastily sanctified) subterranean quarries under the city.
Ever wonder what 6 million corpses look like? Here are some photos:
Memorial cross in front of the ossuary bone piles.
Skull and crossbones.
Close-up on bone walls.
Memorial inscription in front of another of the ubiquitous walls of bones.
Another close in on the bone and skull walls.
Susan looking a bit uncertain about the whole affair.
As you can see, they really took great care with the bones — they didn’t just chuck them into a hole in the ground, but carefully stacked the skulls and long bones (mostly femurs and humeri) into walls, and then piled in all the small bits behind them. They even arranged them in aesthetic patterns and erected numerous monuments, memorials, and inscriptions. Over all, it was fairly touching.
One of the oddest things there, though, was just outside the ossuary. (The quarry tunnels run for almost a kilometer before you enter the ossuary itself.) One of the miners spent years carving a relief diorama of a prison/fortress complex that he had been imprisoned in for some time:
Fortress carving, catacombs of Paris.
Fortress carving, catacombs of Paris.
Sorry about the dim, grainyness of the photos. It was very low light and flashes were prohibited. (Not that that stopped some stupid tourists, of both American and French persuasions.) We were pretty proud of figuring out our fancy digital camera enough to get any pictures at all in these conditions.