The centrepiece of today was a visit to the
Paris Catacombs, but it had a couple of unexpected (pleasant) twists.
I won’t go into the history of the Catacombs in great detail (feel free to click on the hyperlink above or to look them up), but it was an amazing experience. Until a few months ago I had no idea that they even existed.
Tickets are very difficult to come by – they only release a small amount at a time, a week in advance, and they invariably sell out within an hour or two of being released. But my sister had been able to snaffle 5 tickets, so the five of us (my sister, her husband, my niece, my nephew, and me) set out to catch the Metro to the official entrance in the 14th Arrondisement.
Note that I wrote that we went to the “official” entrance. My nephew just so happens to be part of a clandestine community of people who like to call themselves “Cataphiles”. These are people who like to find and spread the news of the unofficial, hidden or secret entrances and who clandestinely (I used the word “clandestinely” again because it’s so much nicer than “illegally”!) go into the several hundred kilometres of catacomb tunnels that are not open to the public. It appears to be an undergraduate thing. Nevertheless it was kinda nice to have him around as an unofficial tour guide and it must be admitted that he does know an awful lot about the Catacombs!
My introduction to the Catacombs has been very much a crash course, so hopefully someone will correct me if I have gotten anything wrong. The Catacombs began as a series of underground quarries which serviced Paris’ insatiable need for stone. However, in the 1700s Paris literally started to sink into the ground under the weight of its own buildings. So clever people were tasked with reinforcing the underground quarries, and the “Catacobs” were born.
Also in the late 1700s, Paris’ cemeteries were becoming a health issue, as well as taking up too much space. So it was decided to transfer 10 million (yes, 10 million) skeletons of Parisians who had died between about the 10th and 18th Centuries AD to the disused underground quarries – hence they became known as the “Catacombs”. I have to say that, having visited today, that 10 million figure is absolutely believable! Most of the bones were deposited between about 1785 and 1860.
My nephew tells me that what I saw today was the “sanitised” part of the Catacombs – he’s been to places where the bones are just haphazardly scattered on the ground anywhere and everywhere. Apparently, this is the largest underground ossuary in the world, and I can believe it.
(A note about the skeletons: I will not be totally able to avoid featuring photos of them below. But I will also try to confine the more explicit and potentially distressing photos to thumbnails in the post after this one [once I remember how to do that]. So if you’re interested, that’s where they’ll be.)
We began by going down 130 or so stairs, until we were about 20 metres underground.
As you begin to walk through, you have no idea of what’s coming up.
You pass signs carved into the walls. This one states that this tunnel was built in 1847 by a man whose surname begins with “J”, and it was the fifth tunnel he’d worked on that year.
This tunnel was one of the earlier ones, from 1781.
There are also signs like this, advising what street we were currently underneath.
You pass through reminders that this used to be a working quarry.
Soon you come to an archway with a sign: “Arrette: C’est ici L’Empire de la Mort”. Translated: “Halt. Here is the Empire of the Dead”.
You then enter to be greeted by this sight:
You walk through what seems to be a couple of kilometres of wall-to-wall piles of bones.
Many signs state which cemetary the bones are from, and the year they were transferred to the Catacombs.
At various places there are quotes from the Bible and ancient literature such as Virgil.
A lot of people involved in various uprisings (including the French Revolution itself) were buried here directly, rather than having their bodies transferred from an above-ground cemetery.
Towards the end of our time underground we came across a larger room with this "construction" in the middle.
We also saw this vertical tunnel, through which quarried rock was raised to ground-level during the catacombs’ life as a quarry.
We emerged after about an hour. Talk about a surreal experience!
