(Source: pics24h.com)
Posts tagged funeral
The town of Hallstatt looks like the kind of Austrian town that the Sound of Music might have been set in. On a beautiful forested mountain, next to a perfectly blue lake, filled with charming 19th century houses, the town is a perfect vision of cheer. Except of course, for the room filled with skulls. Behind the Hallstatt Catholic Church, near the 12th-century St. Micheal’s Chapel, in a small and lovingly cared for cemetery is the Hallstatt Beinhaus, also known as the Charnel House. A small building, it is tightly stacked with over 1200 skulls. Because Hallstatt finds itself in such a lovely location, it also finds itself in very short supply of burial grounds. In the 1700s, the Church began digging up corpses to make way for the newly dead. The bodies which had been buried for only 10 to 15 years were then stacked inside the charnel house. Lest this all sound overly callous to the memory of the dead, there is actually a charm to the whole affair that Hallstatt can’t seem to escape even with a room full of skulls. Once the skeletons were exhumed and properly bleached in the sun, the family members would stack the bones next to their nearest kin. In 1720 a tradition began of painting the skulls with symbolic decorations as well as dates of birth and death so that the dead would be remembered, even if they no longer had a grave. Of the 1200 skulls, some 610 of them were lovingly painted, with an assortment of symbols, laurels for valor, roses for love, and so on. The ones from the 1700s are painted with thick dark garlands, while the newer ones, from the 1800s on, bear brighter floral styles. Though this practice has been dying out since the 1960s, there is a much more recent skull in the Beinhaus. Beside the cross with a gold tooth is the skull of a woman who died in 1983. Her last request was to be put in the Beinhaus. Her skull was entered into the ossuary in 1995, the very last bone to be placed in the Beinhaus.
(Source: atlasobscura.com)
In 1775, the Marquis de Sade wrote of it, “I have never seen anything more striking.” Granted, the crypt was to his tastes. Mark Twain wrote about it in his 1869 book Innocents Abroad. When Twain asked one of the monks what would happen when he died, the monk responded, “We must all lie here at last.” And lie there they do. Some 4,000 Capuchin friars who died between 1528 and 1870 are still lying, hanging, and generally adorning the Santa Maria della Concezione crypt in Rome. In 1631, the Capuchin friars - so-called because of the “capuche” or hood attached to their religious habit - left the friary of St. Bonaventure near the Trevi Fountain and came to live at the Santa Maria della Concezione, of which only the church and crypt remain. They were ordered by the Pope’s brother to bring the remains of the deceased friars along with them to their new home, so that all the Capuchin friars might be in one place. Rather than simply burying the remains of their dead brethren, the monks decorated the walls of the crypts with their bones as a way of reminding themselves that death could come at anytime; one must always be ready to meet God. A plaque in the crypt reads: “What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be.” The ossuary contains a crypt of skulls, a crypt of leg bones, and perhaps the oddest - a “crypt of pelvises.” Mummified monks were dressed in friar’s clothes and hung from the walls and ceiling. With the addition of electricity, light fixtures were incorporated into some of the hanging monks, bringing a new meaning to the phrase “the eternal light.” Click here to see more
