Bones in Churches, what’s that about?
“What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be”
Santuario di San Bernardino alle Ossa - Milan, Italy
On a recent trip to Milan, I went to a chapel that was filled with human bones from floor to ceiling. This was about the fourth such place I have encountered over time and it really got me wondering how we got from dead bodies to decorating the ceiling of a chapel with bones arranged like flowers. You know, what homo monk decided “Hey, let me be in charge of the decorating” and then got a little carried away with his aspirational interior design vision. We’ve all been there, you think you need a new candle holder then end up with an enormous print of Breughel’s Tower of Babel and 100 year old wooden organ pipes on your wall.
These bone collections in churches are called ossuaries and seem to be a Catholic specialty around Europe. As a matter of fact, there is one not too far from where I live in Cologne. Allegedly, it is filled with the remains of 11,000 virgins. Where they found 11,000 virgins in the city of Carnival remains a mystery to me.
An ossuary can be just a simple box, a chapel, or underground caverns. Often bodies were buried in temporary graves then after some time, the bones were removed, cleaned then displayed. In some cases, the bones came from overflowing graveyards that were for sanitary reasons emptied and moved outside the city walls, or in other cases they were taken a long when a monastic order moved to a new location. You can’t take the furniture, but please take your ancestors.
Generally thought of as a more historical tradition stretching back 3000 years to the Zoroastrians in Persia and peaking in the 18th century, more recently an Austrian woman was placed in Hallstatt’s Beinhaus (Bone house) in 1995. It was her final wish to be placed in the 12th century ossuary with the other more historical inhabitants. #YOLO.
Let’s take a quick look at four examples of Ossuaries that you can visit here in Europe.
It’s a sort of Goth meets Rococo situation.
Santuario di San Bernardino alle Ossa
In 1145, a new hospital and graveyard were built in Milan. It would be another 702 years before doctors would start to wash their hands so by 1210 the graveyard was overflowing. As a solution to this problem they built a small ossuary chapel to house the bones of the hospital guests that did not check out.
In 1269 an adjoining church was built and then renovated in 1679 by Giovanni Andrea Biffi. Biffi was the one who was responsible for decorating the walls with human skulls and tibiae in the form we see it today. It’s a sort of Goth meets Rococo situation.
The chapel is open to the public, but it is a little hard to find because there are two churches side by side. When I was there, one was filled with bones, and the other had a priest leading a Mass with a guitar. Your choice.
Like a scene from a Zombie movie
Catacombes de Paris
Keeping with the theme of overflowing graveyards, we move to Paris, to the mother of all Ossuaries, or in this case catacombs. Home to the remains of some 6 million people the Paris catacombs is part of an elaborate system of tunnels from former quarries under Paris dating back to the Roman times
Started in the middle ages, Cimetière des Saints-Innocents was Paris’ oldest and largest cemetery and was located close to present day Les Halles.
The cemetery was stuffed to overflowing and after a very rainy spring 1780, what I can only assume would have looked like a scene from a Zombie movie occurred or, for those of you with a lighter constitution, “the conditions became untenable“ and in September it was forbidden to bury any additional bodies in Les Innocents or the other Paris cemeteries.
The Bodies were exhumed, and the bones were moved to the Catacombs in 1786. The following year the church was torn down and the cemetery was replaced by an herb and vegetable market, which has now become a mall, a metro station and an eyesore.
The catacombs, in their first years, were more or less a disorganized bone pile until 1810 when Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury had renovations done that transformed the caverns into a visitable mausoleum. It was also his artistic vision to stack the skulls and femurs into the slightly disturbing patterns we see today. He also used all the cemetery decorations he could find and to heighten the drama engraved warnings “Stop, this is the empire of death”. He also created a room showing various skeletal deformities found from the catacombs' newly re-organized inhabitants.
The catacombs are open to the public, but is a very popular spot to visit, often the line being hours long, so book your ticket early, or get up early and have brunch afterwards. Trust me on this.
Fun partially related fact: In 2004, police discovered a fully equipped movie theater in one of the caverns. It was equipped with a giant cinema screen, seats for the audience, projection equipment, a fully stocked bar, and a complete restaurant with tables and chairs.
Which body part was used for which artistic flourish?
Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini
This was the first ossuary I ever wandered into and it is hard to beat. Delicate flowers and swirls on the vaulted ceilings made of ribs, fingers and vertebrae as well as full skeletons dressed as friars fill five small chapels. I would say at first it isn’t clear what the decoration is made of, but that isn’t exactly true. It just takes a moment to identify which former body part was used for which artistic flourish.
The church was commissioned in 1626 by Pope Urban VIII, whose brother, Antonio Barberini, was a Capuchin friar and when the monks moved from their old monastery they brought 300 cart loads of bones with them. Michael of Bergamo took the reins for the artistic arrangement of the bones and gave the chapels catchy names like “Crypt of the Skulls”, “Crypt of the Pelvises” or “Crypt of the leg and thigh bones” one chapel does not contain bones, and this is where they celebrate(d) Mass
As monks died, the longest-buried monk was exhumed to make space for the newly deceased monk who was buried without a coffin. Then the bones from the exhumed monk were added to the decoration of the chapels after 30 years of decomposition in the soil which was shipped in from Jerusalem. The chapels contain 3,700 bodies who died between 1528 and 1870.
The crypt has been on the macabre tourist’s list for a few hundred years and it is still open to the public, but there are strictly no photos allowed. Normally, this rule gets my blood boiling in palaces and galleries, but in this particular case it makes complete sense. I will leave you with a quote from Mark Twain who visited the crypt in the summer of 1867 and wrote
“The reflection that he must someday be taken apart like an engine or a clock...and worked up into arches and pyramids and hideous frescoes, did not distress this monk in the least. I thought he even looked as if he were thinking, with complacent vanity, that his own skull would look well on top of the heap and his own ribs add a charm to the frescoes which possibly they lacked at present“
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1869
The body count increased 1000 fold due to clerical error
Basilica of St. Ursula
One of the twelve Roman churches in Cologne, St. Ursula contains the bones of 11,000 virgins. Fun.
The story of St. Ursula and her troop of anonymous virgins is rather light on facts and frankly is all over the map when it comes to age, location, death and entourage. She, potentially a 12-year-old girl, may have been a princess from Britain who, with her 11,000 virgins, set sail to join her future husband. After a magical storm brought them across the sea in just one night, she declared she would embark on a pilgrimage across Europe. This, of course, turned out to be a bad idea and she and her virginal friends were besieged by the Huns in Cologne around 383. The virgins lost their heads, and Ursula was shot in the heart with an arrow.
There has been a tradition of virgin martyrs in Cologne since the fifth century, their number may have been limited to between two and eleven, but due to a potential clerical error misreading “XI M” as “11,000” instead of “11 Martyrs” the number skyrocketed sometime by the end of the 9th century.
During a 13th century renovation, bones were found buried under the church, but it wasn’t until a 17th century chapel was added that the bones were displayed as we see them today. Described as a "veritable tsunami of ribs, shoulder blades, and femurs” the room is covered with bones of which many have been used to spell out Latin words. One thing is certain, there are more than 11 people in the room, but far less than 11,000. At one point a surgeon was driven out of Cologne for suggesting that intermingled with the human remains were those of full-grown large dogs. Seriously, it doesn’t get any weirder than this, kids.