Stop! This is the empire of death.
A brief history of the Catacombs:
Long long ago, sometime in the 1780s, the neighborhood of Les Halles in Paris realized it had a problem. The problem was that people kept dying, but the local Cemetery of the Innocents was staying the same size. It turns out that after approximately six centuries spent trying to stuff innumerable bodies into the same limited graveyard, the laws of physics take over. The burial ground literally exploded, right into the basements of neighboring houses. And permissive though most Parisians are of unseemly aromas, an avalanche of rotting corpses in the cellars were not pleasing to them. For sanitary reasons, it was therefore decided that all the cemeteries in Paris should be dug up and the remains of their human inhabitants transferred outside of the city limits. The natural choice for the new storage locale was an old mine in what is now the 14th arrondissement. Bones upon bones were exhumed, transported, and rearranged at the new location in aesthetically pleasing configurations, and now you can pay five euros to walk through the chilly, wet caverns and peer uneasily into the empty eye sockets of the men and women of yesteryear. Thus, the catacombs were born.
There are signs in the Catacombs that tell you which bones came from which cemetery. The bones that Lena and I are casting our shadows on in this picture are from the now defunct Cemitiere des Innocents, the oldest cemetery in Paris.
Look honey, I made you a heart. Of skulls.
Do I blend in?
When no one was looking I picked up a pelvis.
And then I dared Lena to do the same.
From some areas that had been damaged it was evident that the bones are not merely stacked together, but held in place by some kind of mortar.
On top of some of the piles, though, there are loose bones that (as evidenced) one could conceivably pick up and carry off. For this reason, there are guards posted at the exit door to make sure you don't have any stowaway tibias in your purse. It dawned on us later that the skull and two leg bones that we saw on a folding table on the way out were probably attempted thefts that had been caught by the guards!
2 comments:
Somehow one never sees this creepiness featured in the romantic images of Paris...I cannot imagine why....
I am moderately upset that this has not been updated recently, as I want to hear about foreign escapades accomplished by you and your cohorts. However, there is nothing I can do about it. Unless you want me to write a guest entry wherein I invent random Parisian adventures for you and your study abroad friends. Which, to me, sounds like an awesome idea.
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