Repositories of Bones, Part Two: The Winding Underworld of Catacombs

Narrow subterranean corridors interlace for miles, linking vestibules, chambers, and hidden entrances. Ceilings and temperatures down here are chilly, and damp dimness pervades the disorienting, psychologically confrontational environment.

Both ossuaries and catacombs originally served society in practical but distinct ways, providing alternatives to standard practice when burial space ran out. Catacombs (the name comes from the Latin phrase for “beside the quarry”,) were built from disused underground caverns and passages reclaimed for new graves, unlike ossuaries where bones were placed after the decomposing elsewhere.

This extinct form of burial from ancient death care is unique — many sites remain accessible and allow close-up examination by scholars, death care professionals, and the general public. Once relatively common across Europe and surrounding regions, catacombs today are primarily tourist sites, macabre spectacles in high demand.

Famous examples

When we hear “catacombs” these days, the widely-known site in Paris almost always springs to mind first, though interestingly it’s relatively small, as catacombs go. About twenty meters of corridors and larger chambers display the skulls and long bones of millions of individuals in elaborate arrangements, smaller bones tossed behind the ornate facade.

The place is slightly misnamed. From the official website:
The site was consecrated as the “Paris Municipal Ossuary” on April 7, 1786, and, from that time forward, took on the mythical name of “Catacombs”, in reference to the Roman catacombs, which had fascinated the public since their discovery.

Because of health problems in the city limits, Paris cemeteries which had been consistently in use for a full thousand years (the city itself has been around for 2,000) were emptied, and occupants removed to caverns of a municipal quarry. This is what happens with any proper ossuary. Other catacombs are underground primary burial places where the newly dead were placed.

Why the deliberate misnaming? Originators thought the term more poetic and believed it would support acceptance, perhaps hoping to offset some of the scandal of its creation. Over a period of years during the mid-1700s, remains from the largest, oldest cemeteries in the city were relocated at night, taking place under cover of darkness to avoid public outrage.

History

The first catacombs on record have Christian associations. They began with the church as resting places for clergy and were intended for reverence or contemplation. As with ossuaries, land shortages and burial restrictions contributed to their creation.

Catacombs were once widely used, and they were still commonly added to up through the 1800s. There’s a long and illustrative history of their active use. These places present a spectacle of human mortality that still fascinates widely, and anyone can visit the real thing in Italy to see it firsthand — Palermo, San Sebastiano, and Domitilla which dates back to 120 AD. And San Callisto, one of the originals, boasts a crypt of popes.

Death spaces across time

Such truly extraordinary places offer an intimate view of a bygone era’s relationship with mortality. These are death spaces straight from history; today’s more perfunctory, technical equivalents of prep rooms, cemeteries, even columbaria and memorial halls or regionally astonishing examples in places like New Orleans, don’t have the same sort of architectural gravitas and expression. It’s an authentically mesmerizing view of the changes in social relationships with mortality and death care practices over time.

Repositories of Bones, Part One: Ossuaries

Ossuaries can be, of course, elaborate and ornate places, sites of unique tribute to the deceased. The artistic displays of relocated human bones in ossuaries are often stunning arrangements with an impact that is not soon forgotten, as much for aesthetic force as its statement on the fleeting nature of mortality.

Originating as constructions intended to solve the logistical problem of graveyard overcrowding, ossuaries are not all fancy — some are more workaday collections, mass graves less of art than of preservation.

And ossuaries are distinct from (though simultanously similar in character to) catacombs, primarily in layout and set-up, though also a bit in nature: typically smaller rooms or buildings above-ground, ossuaries hold the bones of far fewer people than catacombs. More elaborate subterranean structures that range widely, sometimes sprawling and extending over hectares of distance, catacombs may house the remains of many thousands.

There are plentiful examples of both types of sites all over the world, though these days cremation has mostly eliminated their practical necessity. Still the prospect fascinates many, judging by the sheer volume of annual visitors to the world’s most well-known examples.

Widely practiced

Ossuaries can be found in especial abundance in Europe, where the most famous still attract tremendous numbers of visitors. Today there are still many accessible examples.

Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic is a church rather than a mass grave; it first became popular before the plague in Europe and was considered a holy place to be buried after an abbot brought a container of dirt from the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified. After he spread its contents on the earth in the area, many desired to be buried at the location. Today, stunning arrangements of deconstructed skeletons arranged into elaborate designs inside a temple create a mystical, enchanting effect.

Another chapel is the Palace of Bones in Evora, Prague, which dates back to the 17th century. A trademark of the city of Evora and housing 5,000 human skulls, this UNESCO world heritage site bears a welcoming message: “We bones that are here, for yours we wait.” There’s Poland, with the Chapel in Czermna, holding the remains of some 21,000 souls. And don’t even get us started on Germany; examples here are thick on the ground, so to speak. If youre interested, though, don’t pass it up. There are even some in the United States from the period before colonization.

Ossuaries stand as a reminder that our lives and deaths are shaped by space, time, and circumstance. Whether ornate or austere, these places reflect a pragmatic reverence and a spiritual sense of obligation to the traces of human lives we recognize as significant.

Each skull, each stacked femur, speaks to a long lineage of grief, practicality, and beauty shaped from necessity. The walls echo with more than bones: memory, culture, and the enduring instinct to care for our dead, even when the means of doing so take forms we no longer need, but sense and honor. Beauty is a small price to pay when the placement of names and identities is no longer possible.