Bones, Bones, Dry Bones
Unless otherwise noted, all pictures are copyright of my friend, travel partner, and fellow guerilla urbanist Steve Duncan. Steve is a wonderful photographer, and specializes in underground and urban photography. Prints are available - visit his website at http://www.undercity.org
There’s a myriad of interesting things down in the catas. But the most famous are the ossuaries - underground chambers where they’ve put the bones of the long-deceased of Paris. The lack of cemetery space (and the fact that improperly buried bodies were causing mass outbreaks of disease), led to the wholesale exhumation of some cemeteries about a couple hundred years ago. The old bones were treated with lime to stop the putrification process, and placed down in the limestone quarries.
Most of the remains of the 7 million or so dead Parisians can be viewed on the official catacombs tour, which we also took. Here, the bones are neatly stacked along on the walls of the quarry tunnels, with the skulls sometimes being used to form patterns. However, there’s a few ossuaries that aren’t part of the official tour. On our first trip into the catas, we made them our first destination.
After a couple hours we found them. They were very different from the neatly arranged stacks on the official tour though - they were basically just small rooms and tunnels filled with old dry bones. In one tunnel they hadn’t fully sealed up the well that they used to throw the bones down. The result was an eerie effect - you could look up and it seemed like you were about to be buried in bones. There were almost no skulls - we were later told that pretty much all of them had been taken for souvenirs.
An aside for anyone contemplating a cata trip - as I explained before, visiting the catas, while illegal, is usually not that big a deal if you get caught. If you get stopped at the airport trying to take home Jean-Pierre’s femur, however, you’re going to be in a world of trouble. And regardless, you should really have a little more respect for the dead - although I suppose being taken and put on a tourist’s mantlepiece is just as dignified as being thrown down into an old limestone quarry.
You know, I totally thought I’d be creeped out by crawling through corridors on top of 500-year-old human remains, but it was actually pretty normal. So normal, in fact, I couldn’t resist taking one of my famous Double Guns shots of me and the bones.
Tags: Below, Catacombs, France, Paris, Underground
