Quezi

Catacombs of Paris - courtesy albany_tim - CC-BY

“Stop! This is the empire of death.”  Thus reads the sign over the entry of the catacombs of Paris, France.

Beyond that sign is another world. What at first appear to be walls built of small stones are in fact huge, orderly piles of human bones. Tibias and femurs by the thousands are stacked neatly, interspersed with rows of skulls, which are sometimes arranged very artistically. There are no intact skeletons. The goal of the arrangement is for maximum compactness.

They are different from the catacombs of ancient Rome in that the catacombs of Paris are less than two hundred years old.

The accumulation of bones in the Parisian catacombs began in 1786. Real estate was scarce while the cemeteries were becoming severely overcrowded and extremely unhealthy to the living. The government decided to reclaim the land used for cemeteries by relocating the remains to the empty limestone quarries, whose tunnels were at that time on the edge of the city.

The process of disinterring the bones from the cemeteries, moving them to the quarries, and arranging them there took several decades. No attempt was made to identify or separate individual bodies, but each set of bones was marked with a plaque designating the cemetery they came from. By the time the work was finished in 1860, an estimated five to six million skeletons had been relocated to the catacombs. The bones filled only a tiny percentage of the empty quarries. Although no complete modern map is known to exist, explorers have estimated that there are at least 185 miles of tunnels in the entire network of catacombs.

The catacombs have been open to the public on a regular basis since 1867.

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