The Empire of the Dead
The cold, heavy water droplet falls off the stone ceiling and rolls down the raised hairs on the back of your neck. The silence in the tunnel would be absolute, if not for the echo of your footfalls. It is unnaturally cold, you notice as you walk under the archway that reads: "ARRÈTE! C'EST ÍCÍ L'EMPÍRE DE LA MORT" "Stop! Here lies the Empire of the Dead" Hundreds of feet under the streets of Paris, you can visit a place truly bone-chilling: The Catacombs of Paris. The Catacombs consists of over two hundred miles of tunnels, holding the skeletal remains of somewhere around six million people. The need for a catacombs became apparent in 1780, when an overfilled cemetery collapsed into a hotel basement. The solution: to use an abandoned tunnel system to hold the extra corpses temporarily. But as more and more cemeteries began filling up, they realized they could use the tunnels as a permanent place of rest. Although the catacombs aren't accepting corpses now, they do allow live visitors.
The tour starts by climbing down dozens of winding stone stairs. After the stairs comes the tunnels. Before you reach the catacombs themselves, you have to walk through several hundred feet of small, damp, maze-like tunnels, your only guide being the scorched line on the ceiling made by the catacomb burial crews. Emerging from the tunnels, you enter a larger, albeit not by much, atrium in which you can see the entrance to the catacombs. Moodily lit with hazy red lights, shadows jump from corner to corner, hiding and reaching out from beneath the bones. Looking just over the tops of the skulls, you can see the mass of femurs and vertebrae disappearing into the darkness on either side. The wide, curving tunnels, walled with the bones of the "Innocents," seem to close in around you as intrigue and human curiosity alone pull you further into the darkness. If the bones aren't enough, there are also the ancient monuments spread throughout the tunnels. These testaments to lost lifetimes represent an assortment of things: from a heart of skulls made solely of a family's remains, to an altar marking a section of the catacombs devoted to housing only children's bones. So, after an hour and a half of cold chills and backward glances, this truly unique experience is brought to a close with more stairs. 130 stairs later and you enter the gift shop, where you can buy all sorts of dead paraphernalia such as: skull shot-glasses, femur pencils, and rib-cage diaries. So the next time you see a cheerful picture of the Eiffel Tower, remember what lies just beneath the "City of Love."
Photos from Flickr
