Catacombs, Paris, FranceAfter a day at the Louvre, what could be better than to spend the next day s

Catacombs, Paris, FranceAfter a day at the Louvre, what could be better than to spend the next day surrounded by literal dead bones, right?I am, you may have gathered, a big fan of tombs, bones, burial grounds, cemeteries, and other ways humans try to mark their brief existence into a more lasting form. So of course I was interested in the catacombs, not to mention that the whole network of tunnels is mysterious, underexplored, largely illegal, and has claimed at least one life and also has a movie theatre in it.Some backstory: Paris is built on a largely limestone foundation, and early in the city’s history, limestone was mined for use in buildings. These mines were a) underground and b) outside the original urban center, therefore c) over time they were forgotten about until d) a building inevitably collapsed.From 1774, the French government began mapping the tunnels in order to hopefully prevent further building collapses, but the situation shifted dramatically in 1780, when something seemingly unrelated happened: Weight of the stacked dead bodies in the walls of the Holy Innocents Cemetery collapsed a basement of an adjoining house. For centuries, burials in Paris had been limited to certain graveyards, or you could be buried in the suburbs–and for centuries, these graveyards had been filling up. By 1780, Holy Innocents was literally 6 feet deep in bones, and the parish’s attics and basements had been filed with older corpses–leading to the collapse.Thinking to solve two problems with one massive body transfer, Police Lieutenant-General Alexandre Lenoir supported the idea of moving the ancient dead into the tunnels. From 1785 to 1787, wagons carried bones from the cemeteries to the most explored section of tunnels–totaling 2 million from Holy Innocents and an estimated 6 million overall.At first, bodies were dumped in with no clear plan. But in 1810, Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury decided that this could actually be a grand tourist attraction and also much more attractive, and began stacking bones by type and making patters in the resulting walls of bones.When I visited, you could still queue up for a cheaper ticket than booking online (looks like today you can have the best of both worlds by booking only a day in advance), so I spent about 2.5 hours queuing and talking with a couple from Boston.Once inside, it’s important to know that the vast majority of the tunnels (~140 miles) are closed to the public. Even about 2/3 of the catacombs (~1 mile) are off limits. What you see is a small, intensely curated portion.And it’s amazing.Some quick notes on photos: The warning about entering the empire of death was put there by de Thury, who by all accounts was a bit of a drama queen. The bricks with dates were placed there by the mining teams who first stabilized that particular tunnel–so some of these tunnels have been open since 1784. Some since 2014. Yes, there’s a lot of crosses, and also several of the supporting columns have been entirely surrounded by bones.It’s actually a huge source of frustration for medieval archaeologists, because for once they have access to a near complete cross-section of society–and also every body has been completely disassembled, they’ve been stripped of all context, and many of the key bones (teeth and fingers for diet and jobs, ex.) are missing, piled behind the more dramatic long bones, or have disintegrated.But mostly it’s amazing. One of the creepiest places I have ever been in. -- source link
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