How many bodies catacombs paris

To create space, graves of Parisians who had been dead for decades or centuries were exhumed, their skeletal remains tightly packed together into charnier s mass graves built in the walls of the cemetery. The main burial grounds reportedly rose two metres more than six feet above the ground compared to surrounding streets, with layers of graves separated only by loose mounds of earth. And during the midth century, merchants and residents began to complain of fetid, horrifying odors emanating from the Innocents and infecting surrounding buildings.

To solve the problem of relocating the remains of millions of people from the Innocents, city planners and officials had to get creative. They identified a vast network of underground limestone quarries on the left bank— much of them then outside the bounds of Paris— as an ideal place to store the remains of millions of Parisians.

Workers heaped bones into quarry wells, then piled them in the galleries of old subterranean quarries. In later decades and following the French Revolution, other graveyards and cemeteries in the city center were exhumed, with more remains transferred to the Catacombs. In , the Catacombs were opened to the general public, but only by appointment. It quickly became a hit with locals and tourists, and even figures such as Napoleon III and his son visited the site.

Part of the appeal was its mythical association with ancient Roman catacombs in nearby Italy. Another part of it a nineteenth-century, Romantic interest in the macabre and the medieval. Of course, I highly recommend a visit to both. The minute circuit takes you down a long spiral staircase to enter the old limestone quarries. Some form crosses or other recognizable, symmetrical patterns, while others appear to be unceremoniously lumped together in tall stacks and lines, sometimes behind metal grates and under low ceilings.

Who are all these people, and what sorts of lives did they live? We know, as mentioned above, that many were plague victims. The tombs, common graves and charnel house were emptied of their bones, which were transported at night to avoid hostile reactions from the Parisian population and the Church.

The bones were dumped into two quarry wells and then distributed and piled into the galleries by the quarry workers. Transfers continued after the French Revolution until , with the suppression of parochial cemeteries, such as Saint-Eustache, Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs and the Bernardins Convent, in the center of Paris.

They were begun again in , during urban renovation by Louis-Philippe and the Haussmannian reconfiguration of the city from to Given the religious nature of the original burials, they could not simply be dug up and thrown around willy nilly, either — they would have to be re-buried with some form of ritual in one of the largest transmissions of human remains in history.

Fortuitously for the nascent Paris Catacombs project, the city sat directly above some miles of limestone tunnels that had been carved out to provide the very stones from which the city was built.

The tunnels were so extensive that by the 19th century the weight of the city above was creating giant sinkholes into which entire buildings and blocks were collapsing. No pressure, then. Despite the size of the challenge, Guillaumot pulled it off without much fuss. By the tunnels were stable and the remains of dead Parisians were being dug up every night and transferred into them. Above ground, public works went on hold for a few years while France had a revolution, executed a lot of people, and then slowly started to rebuild.

When Napoleon marched to power on the back of the Revolution he inherited a medieval city that was in the throws of rapid modernization. Given that Rome, which was considered the preeminent monumental city in Europe, already had its much-vaunted system of Catacombs that intrepid tourists could visit, Napoleon decided that France needed something similar. Despite the ritual with which they were transferred, the bones had simply been dumped into the tunnels in large heaps.

Slowly but surely the quarrymen lined the walls with tibias and femurs punctuated with skulls which form the basis of most of the decorations that tourists see today. Both out of whimsy and to convey deeper religious messages about death, they also arranged bones in various shapes, like hearts, circles and death heads. Siddharth Ganguly May 14 , Related Articles.

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