The Roman Catholic Church’s morbid fascination with bones knows no bounds. Neither does mine. I’ve looked for and found macabre bony consructs all the way from Prague to Lima and with generous helpings in Italy and France.
For a religion with such a glorious afterlife, with flying cherubim serenading angelically beautiful people whose alabaster skins are warmed by the pure light of God, it somehow can’t seem to forget the rotting flesh and yellowed bones beneath.
The first time I really came across this religious fetish was when I was visiting friends in the Czech Republic. One day we headed out for the Bone Church near Kutna Hora, about 50 km east of Prague.
Prague itself is straight out of a gothic fantasy and it’s easy to imagine golems stumbling clumsily through its medieval streets, arms outstretched and pursued by townsfolk with pitchforks taking a break from burning vampires and witches.
Indeed, some terrible, society-wide horror must have befallen the country in the old days. How else can you explain the food? Whatever apocalyptic event happened must have involved mass starvation for Czech cooking is about stodgy food that fills the stomach quickly and to hell with the taste! I mean unflavoured dumplings that are just boiled flour. What’s that about?
For the sake of balance, I’ll admit that Czech beer is really good. Also, the colossal Hapsburg palaces covering square kilometres of Prague and Vienna and Budapest are in pristine condition, as though they were abandoned only yesterday which, from an historical perspective, they essentially were when the 600-year-old empire vanished almost overnight just one hundred years ago. It’s like visiting ancient Rome except everything is perfectly intact.
The Hapsburgs were a strange bunch as exemplified by their treatment of animals. Leopold I had a penchant for having foxes wrapped up in blankets so a gang of dwarves could beat them to death with sticks. Rudolf II released cheetahs into the streets of Prague. Franz Ferdinand, whose own shooting was the catalyst for World War One and also the dissolution of the Hapsburg empire, is believed to have shot over 300,000 animals in his lifetime. His personal best being 2140 in a single day.
I think I might have shot him myself if I’d had the chance.
Anyway, we set out to the Bone Church leaving the city of Prague and its gingerbread edifices behind. The land around was generally flat, and after a fairly long drive and several wrong turns, even with a Czech speaker on board who could read the signposts, we found a long gentle hill leading up from Kutna Hora town centre. Somewhere up there was the village of Sedlec and its Bone Church.
After driving around a bit, we finally spotted its low double towers. We parked in a street of single storey buildings where I felt many eyes watching us through net curtains.
Entering the church, we passed a little alcove with all sorts of morbid memorabilia for sale. The only light came from a string of low wattage bulbs above wide stone steps leading down into the crypt.
Descending, the first thing I noticed was a white chandelier tipped with skulls where the candles should have been. Long bones hung from the arms of the chandelier like frills. Instead of a suspension from chains, it hung from a wild variety of interlinked bones. For decorative effect around its rim, stacks of sacral bones had been fanned out like feathered plumes.
For an instant, I felt dizzy and leaned back against the wall but instead of plaster felt bone under my hand. A line of skulls hung there, and below each were two crossed long bones like the design on a pirate flag. Jerking myself back upright disturbed the skull and bone motif and it rattled irritably.
The crypt had a tapering pillar that reached only half way to the ceiling. Each of its three sides had a vertical row of skulls, getting bigger as they got nearer the floor.
Looking around more carefully now, I noticed the bunting in the form of paper lanterns strung in many loops across the ceiling and all made from skulls.
Around the walls, streamers of arm bones hung like curtain pelmets.
So distracting were all these ghoulish decorations, that when I finally saw the four huge pyramids of skulls, it came as a surprise. Standing in each corner of the crypt, they were about four metres high with each layer of skulls resting on cross braces of countless thigh bones.
Getting closer to one pyramid, I saw a hole about a third of the way up. Out of this emerged a reddish light. Peering in was like looking into an oven, the sides made of human remains. This must be where the devil did his cooking.
The crypt has the density of ornamentation you would associate with a baroque Bavarian palace except that rather than being constructed from porcelain and mother of pearl and filigree, it’s made from human being.
The story goes that once upon a time this had been just a bog-standard old church that had stood there for centuries. Then, in the thirteenth century, the King of Bohemia had sent an abbot from Sedlec to the Holy Land. The abbot had returned with holy dust which he sprinkled over the cemetery.
Just the proximity of this holy soil meant people wanted to be buried there. Too many for a single churchyard, so when that got full the older bones were displaced to a basement ossuary to make way for fresher material.
Over the following centuries, the build-up of bones from fifty thousand humans in the basement became something of an embarrassment and the elders were at a loss as to what to do. However, a local carpenter stepped forward and said “I have a great idea”.
The carpenter had an artistic bent and the result is the Bone Church. The place went from strength to strength and eventually even the coat of arms of the local aristocracy was constructed from human remains.
The Basilica of San Francisco in Lima in Peru is another bone-related delight. The catacombs contain deep pits full of the bones of twenty-five thousand skeletons, the top layers are again of skulls and thigh bones arranged in gay geometric designs. The skulls form the rims of a wheel design whilst the thigh bones make up the spokes.
Bones rise out of the plaster of the catacombs like morbid 3D frescoes.
The Capuchin Crypt in Rome is another good one. In 1631 the Capuchin monks moved to this new location, dragging along 300 cartloads containing the bones of previous monks of the order. Around 4000 of these skeletons were then used for decorative and architectural purposes.
You’ll find large archways made from skulls and sacrums, thrones draped with what looks like flowing fabric but is actually made from scapula on which lounge strangely underdeveloped skeletons, presumably those of children or late-term foetuses.
Some slightly fresher skeletons with desiccated flesh still adhering are left clothed in monks’ habitats (presumably to prevent shrivelled genitalia being displayed, not a problem with a pure skeleton). These are hung upright, their heads slumped down and their bodies surrounded by arches of sacrums. Next to these are hourglasses, the two funnels meeting at the waisted middle and again all made from human sacrums.
But these bony numbers are very small beer compared to the motherload of six million skeletons in the Paris Catacombs.
The tunnels that contain this ossuary are only part of a large network that connected all the quarries in Paris. Some of these were soon adapted to overcome the problem of too many people over too many centuries dying and being buried in the city. It had got to the point where there was no room left and the whole city was becoming unsanitary with bodies being buried too close to the surface, their fragrant, multi-coloured ichors flowing into wells and the basements of neighbouring houses whenever it rained.
To make space, lower lying corpses long since rotted down to skeletons were exhumed and stored in these subterranean charnel houses. There were so many of these skeletons that it took two years of nightly processions of black shrouded wagons to cart them all to the catacombs. There the bones were dumped higgledy-piggledy. However, under the direction of Louis-Etienne Hericart de Thury, director of Parisian mines back in 1810, these were stacked into patterns to makes hundreds of metres of high, thick walls made only of bones. To liven the place up, certain rooms were set aside for skeletal deformities found during this sepulchral art installation project.
The Catacombs, all 250km of them, have been used by the French Resistance and the Nazis, by the communards (who slaughtered some monarchists there) as well as film makers. Airbnb even managed to secure permission for overnight stays as part of a publicity stunt. They advertised it as the chance to spend the night in the world’s largest grave.
I find it reassuring that I’m not the only weirdo who is fascinated by this kind of thing.
In fact, Parisians have a name for people who secretly break into the catacombs from basements and other tunnels for the sake of performing clandestine rituals or just for a spooky laugh. They’re called cataphiles.
On entering the Catacombs, a sign says Arrete! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort (Stop! This is the empire of Death’).
And it’s not kidding.
You descend twenty metres below Paris and then set out on a 2km walk completely surrounded by bones in a tableau of death. There are electric lights but not many and the darkness is always edging in.
Though there is no smell of actual rot, damp plus bone has a funny odour all of its own.
As my wife and I made our way through, I was surprised to find a defibrillator hung on a column for ready access.
Too little, too late.
After a mind-boggling walk through unfathomable quantities of the symbols of death, I realised we were twenty metres underground and five hundred metres from the nearest exit. Hemmed in by the bones from six million human corpses, two questions occurred to me:
i) what if there was a power failure and we were plunged into absolute darkness?
ii) if this has happened to people before, did any of them ever subsequently graduate from the locked wards of their psychiatric hospitals?
Quite seriously, if I’d been plunged into the dark at that point, I think I really would have gone mad. The tunnels are curved and split in places, looping back into large chambers from which other tunnels branch off. How would you find your way out in the pitch black? All you’d have would be your sense of touch but what would you be touching? As an added bonus, in the total dark your eyes produce their own phantasms to add to any psychic residues from six million dead people.
There would be sounds of course- the sounds of other tourists whimpering and crying and screaming along the two kilometres of stygian tunnels.
I’m sure a merry time would be had by all.
I can see why places made of bones have a function. They remind us of our own mortality but, let’s face it, a cemetery does that just as well but without using visible human remains. I can’t help coming to the conclusion that these places are macabre just for the sake of it. They’re basically off-colour circus attractions like PT Barnum’s pinheads or four-legged maidens. Except, somehow, they have the sanctity of the Catholic Church behind them.
Visiting these places is our way of flirting with true horror; a quick look then we can once again pretend death doesn’t exist and go back to our safe, comfortable lives.
However illusory those might be.