The major attraction for us in this third visit to Paris are the Catacombs of Paris. Unfortunately to get in you have to stay in a long queue but we persist while enjoying the neighborhood and are rewarded with the entrance tickets, phew.
The Catacombs of Paris are underground ossuaries that hold the remains of more than six million (!) people. That is really a lot compared to other ossuaries we have seen, however of course you have access only to a small selection of tunnels. They were built to consolidate Paris ancient stone quarries and to eliminate the city’s overflowing cemeteries, especially the Holy Innocents Cemetery. The route is so long that it is one way with entrance on one end and exit on the other. They became popular in the 19th century, something that can be deduced by the soot marks from the torches on the ceiling.
Not all of the catacombs are part of the ossuary, there is a lot of descending and walking through the old mine shafts to get to the ossuary part.
There is even a section with some carvings done by a quarry worker ages ago. They are quite good actually, built from the artists recollection of the Seven Year War that he took part in.
And then we arrive at the ossuary section, it is quite special and spooky to see rows and rows of skulls and bones.
Most of them are neatly arranged and we try to imagine the people that went through the bones and then rearranged them in neat rows and creating artwork out of them. Most have been interesting work….
And some times they look like piles of bones with skulls for decoration, it is a bit sobering to think of the many people that were buried first in the cemeteries and the moved here. We even find a plaque marking the fact that they were moved from the Innocents Cemetery, the situation was so bad there that basement walls were collapsing around the cemetery and inspectors were having difficulty conducting business around it due to unsanitary conditions in the cemetery. One of the macabre stories around the movement of the corpses was that quite a few bodies had incompletely decomposed and were reduced into large deposits of fat that were subsequently turned into candles and soap made from human corpses.
After exiting to keep up with the theme we also visit the nearby Montparnasse Cemetery. However we have difficulty identifying anyone important and the graves are not that interesting either so we decide to move on and continue exploring the city.
