Day 30, NaBloWriMo Bone Voyage

It's October ~ Halloween is right around the corner ~ time to read some creepy stuff, eh? History can be a great source ~ Bone Voyage


"les carrieres de Paris" ~ "The Quarries of Paris ~ a small section of underground tunnels turned cemetery that is known today as the catacombs, the empire of the Dead.


A wall of bones and skulls, did you know this lurked beneath romantic Paris? It is a dark beauty, indeed. The underground tunnels were created when the Romans needed stone for temples, baths and arenas ~ the stone was excavated from below the city streets. The maze of caverns grew to over 200 miles. When cave-ins started happening more frequently, excavation was stopped in the 18th century.


Around the time the tunneling was discontinued, Paris was having problems with burial. The cemeteries dated back to medieval times and were overcrowded. Poor burial conditions (open graves and unearthed corpses as well) lead to contamination and sickness. (I'm sorry, but just thinking about this is giving me flashbacks of Katrina, where our "cities of the dead" floated in the waters...) Sickness was rampant especially around the largest church yard, Cimetiere des Innocents (Cemetery of the Innocents). I read this: "The ground of the cemetery had risen 8 feet and in 1780, a wall collapsed, trapping and suffocating many of the living beneath the weight of the bones." (Gruesome thought, isn't it?)

City officials had to do something and quick; on April 7, 1786, the relocation of the bodies started... it took every night for two years to transport three million dead bodies through the streets of Paris to the labyrinth beneath the city. More and more cemeteries sent the dead to the catacombs, ending with a total of 6 million bodies

We are a society to gawk at things.... so it's no surprise that the catacombs have drawn visitors of all types, from prostitutes driven from the streets to beneath, sometimes the poor would find home amongst the bones, Resistance forces used the tunnels as headquarters to launch attacks on the Nazis during WWII, underground parties have taken place. On September 2004, police discovered an underground cinema! Yes, a full size movie screen, electricity, phone lines, chairs and a handful of films from film noir classics to recent thrillers. Next to the cinema was a fully stocked bar and (gulp) a restaurant. The police left and returned in three days with the French Board of Electricity to figure out where the power was coming from (to find the culprits)... only to find instead ~ the cables had been cut and a note was left that read, "Do not try and find us." Paris has special police patrolling the tunnels and there is a fine if caught without a guide by the catacombs.


6 million people, shoved into a maze, wall upon wall of bones. It's said to be "pretty amazing to wind your way through room after room lined with 30 feet of bone." Interestingly enough the bones that are seen are skulls and femur and tibia bones, neatly stacked same-side down. Where are the finger bones and pelvic bones and neck bones? It's imagined that such bone potpourri is further into the maze than what the tour allows. Of the 1.2 miles of the quarries, only 186 miles of tunnels are open to the public.

Oh and if viewing the bones isn't strange enough, I read that if you go into the catacombs with bags or purses, expect them to be checked, because it appears that some people are sick enough to want to take 200 year old skeleton bones back home!

Wishing everyone a Happy Halloween!