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| Pictures on Monday |
| 04.02.04 (3:45 am) [edit] |
Here's a teaser for some photos I plan on taking this weekend.... A few days ago we discovered an "Ossuary" next to the church about 2 minutes from our apartment. It is a wall inside a little chapel built from thousands of human skulls and bones. This is all the info I could find online:
[i]The ossuary, dating from 1514, is a two-floor, late-Gothic building with a saddle roof and open turret. Against a wall in the crypt chapel is a pile of 1500 skulls. These remains were not the local victims of epidemics or wars, but those of the deceased for whom the cemetery was simply too small. Before the wall of skulls there stands a group of baroque crucifixes and above them the inscription: "What you are, we were; what we are, you will be."
At the end of November 1985 restorators found in the ossuary behind a wall of piled up bones and skulls, a trove of statues, tablets (ex-voto) and other reliquaries. [/i]
and this:
[i]It is of interest that each church usually has associated with it a cemetery in which the graves are kept decorated, often with beautiful designs of fresh or artificial flowers. Members of succeeding generations of families are said to be buried one above the other to a depth of many feet. Then, after a sufficient number of generations have been so honored, their bodies are exhumed to make a place for present and coming generations. These skeletons are usually preserved with honor and deference. The bones are stacked in basements of certain buildings of the church edifice with the skulls facing outward. These often constitute a solid wall of considerable extent. In Naters there is such a group said to contain 20,000 skeletons and skulls.[/i]
It's really bizarre - I promise pictures next week!
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posted by: Timothy P. Kugelschreiber (reply)
post date: 04.02.04 (3:55 am)
That is fascinating, man, what a find!
posted by: Dark Lord of the Underground (reply)
post date: 04.02.04 (10:59 am)
Big deal, I have one of those in my basement...ummm..nevermind....
Pretty cool stuff......get some of those campy shots as well..you know with you in one of the pictures...doing something non PC and totally inappropriate to a skull....
posted by: jOhnny (reply)
post date: 04.05.04 (5:40 am)
Put this on our tourist agenda!
I see an album cover in my mind...
posted by: BrianKaren (reply)
post date: 04.05.04 (7:43 am)
No problem johnny - it is literally a 2 minute walk from our apartment....
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