9 November, 2013

Beneath the shops and streets, the south of Paris sits atop a network of over 200 kilometers of ancient and medieval limestone quarries. This is the ground that the stone to build Notre Dame and the city of 1000 years ago. In the late 18^th century, the cemeteries in the city became a problem. The solution that was found was to dig up the bones of over 6,000,000 dead and transfer them to a section of these tunnels. Eight kilometers were walled off and consecrated to become a massive ossuary. Just over one kilometer of this is open to visit. For a history of the bones, go here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_catacombs

I visited on Friday, and spent a couple hours in this underword. It’s hard not to contemplate life and mortality in this empire. Moved here at the turn of the 19^th century, these are the remains of people who have been dead for five to ten times as long as I have been alive. It’s surreal to walk the aisles between retaining walls of femurs stacked nearly six feet high. Behind the walls the bones are piled, slowly returning to dust. It’s amazing to realize that the population of this empire of the dead is over twice that of the city above. (The metro area is much larger –12,000,000 – but the city of Paris proper is 2,500,000.) I am reminded of a shirt I saw many years ago, “It’s not that life’s too short, but that you’re dead for so long.”