Stone and Bone

Paris has some truly amazing cemeteries. Pere Lachaise is one of the biggest and home to some of the craziest gravestones I have ever seen. Because it is a city cemetery, it is not dominated by a single religion or religious iconography. This leaves room for a lot of creativity in terms of tomb/gravestone design.

(This one is actually in Montparnasse)

One of the biggest differences between Pere Lachaise and most cemeteries in the U.S. is the existence of multi-person graves. Entire families are often buried together and many have small chapels dedicated to the family. This works similarly and looks similar to the cemetery system in New Orleans, where family members who have died are simply added to the crypt with all the others and many generations of a family can go into the same crypt.

This is a good system especially because without it, a major city like Paris would quickly run out of space, and when a city like Paris runs out of space, something must be done with the many many remains of the people who keep dying. That’s where the Catacombs come in.

The Catacombs are home to the remains of six million people dating back to the middle ages. When the cemeteries, namely the Cimetiere des Innocents, were filled, bones were disinterred and moved into the catacombs. The catacombs allowed bones to be tightly packed and out of the way (20 meters underground), thereby opening up more land and improving public health. Thats all good, it also gives you miles and miles of walls made of human bones, which…isn’t good per say, but it is interesting. When you’re walking through its hard to fully comprehend the number of real people’s femurs you’re looking at. When it began becoming a tourist attraction, the bones were stacked neatly and sometimes arranged into designs like hearts and crosses, adding to that sense of macabre.

*sidenote- sorry about all my picture loading sideways, I’m going to try to fix that*