Tag Archives: longreads

Death’s Garden: Pastrami in Paris

Posted on November 11, 2016 | 2 comments

deportationby Loren Rhoads

Holding hands inside my coat pocket, Mason and I strolled through the Marais district and enjoyed the watery yellow sunshine. Paris in January was cold. We paused beside a worn brick wall to read the plaque bolted there. Struggling with my imperfect French, I translated the plaque as saying the pockmarks on the wall were bullet holes, left behind when the Nazis shot martyrs.

Our guidebook added that the Nazis and Vichy French dragged 75,000 Jews down this same street on their way to concentration camps.

I was 28 and had no reference for what had happened there, other than a trace of World History in high school. Jews had seemed exotic in the small Michigan farming community where I grew up. Until I met Mason, I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t, in some vague way, Christian.

Mason endured his Bar Mitzvah to placate his grandmother. That same grandmother still refused to allow anything of Japanese or German manufacture into her home. She’d disowned Mason for marrying me — without ever meeting me — even though I’d offered to convert. My blood wasn’t Jewish, so our children would not be Jewish. That mattered to her more than her relationship to her only grandson.

Being ostracized was hard for me to understand, harder still to accept. I would never be one of them. Love could not transform me.

It amazed me that Mason loved me enough to cause a rift in his family.

Afterward, to my disappointment, I found that prejudice ran both ways. My Presbyterian mother said that she didn’t care that I was marrying a Jew, but she would have preferred that he at least practiced his religion. My Baptist grandmother sniffed, “At least he isn’t Black,” but raised no objections at the wedding.

I’d grown up so sheltered; I hadn’t seen the prejudice in my own family. Visiting Europe for the first time opened my eyes to the scope of bigotry against the Jews.

Rue des Rosiers, the street we strolled, had served as the main artery of the historic Jewish quarter of Paris. The quarter had been created in the thirteenth century when King Phillipe Auguste “invited” the Jewish merchants living in front of Notre-Dame to move outside the newly built city wall. The name Rosiers referred to the rosebushes that grew against the outside of the wall. I admired people who found beauty, despite their exile from the safety of the city.

After some consultation of the map, Mason led us to Jo Goldenberg’s deli. Paris Access reported that on August 9, 1982, masked gunmen threw a grenade into the deli, then opened fire as people fled. They injured twenty-two customers and killed six. The PLO took credit for the murders. The gunmen remain unknown.

While we were in Paris, the First Gulf War tore apart Iraq. Throughout Paris, armed soldiers guarded the national treasures. Mason and I read the Herald Tribune each day, dreading the news that Iraq had unleashed germ warfare against Israel. Half-convinced that Jews and those who loved them were safe nowhere, I feared entering the deli.

Added to that, I’d only been in one deli in my life: Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, which my mother-in-law proclaimed was as good as those she’d grown up with in Brooklyn. In big, dark Zingerman’s, I’d kept to familiar foods like egg salad. I daringly ordered it on pumpernickel, which I’d confused with rye bread. In my defense, I’d had a purely white bread childhood. While I explored knishes and hamentashen and Doctor Brown’s cream soda at Zingerman’s, I remained a Presbyterian-raised girl only a couple of years off the farm. I didn’t know corned beef from pastrami. I just thought I didn’t like it.

Goldenberg’s deli was huge and bright inside. The people behind the counter bustled around in spotless white aprons. Their middle-aged patrons filled string shopping bags with packages handed over the counter wrapped in white paper.

Mason and I nudged each other forward. He wanted me to order, in my fractured French. I wanted him to do it, because I felt like such an outsider.

While he negotiated with the counterman, I wandered around the fringes of the salesroom, looking over the merchandise. I didn’t recognize most of it. What was matzo, or gefilte fish? Nothing had prices that I could see. I chose a bottle of wine that I hoped would be both inexpensive and palatable, a vin table rouge. I slipped it onto the counter as Mason got ready to pay.

“You want this too?” the man behind the counter asked in English.

I nodded, too shy to speak.

*

Mason and I stopped to eat in the little park behind Notre-Dame. We huddled together on a green bench. The buttery orange late afternoon sunlight gave little warmth. It flared from the stained glass windows of the great cathedral.

deportation2Nearby stood the Deportation Memorial, which honors the 200,000 French men and women of all races and religions murdered by the Nazis in World War II. One wall of the memorial is starred with 200,000 backlit crystals: one burning for each life snuffed out. Visiting the memorial the previous day had been the first time I’d encountered the command to “Forgive, but never forget.”

How could you forgive?

How could you live without forgiving?

Mason unwrapped the sandwich and handed half to me. The pastrami piled so high I couldn’t open my mouth wide enough to bite it. Instead, I contented myself with nibbling. The pastrami had a marvelous metallic tang beneath its mouthwateringly salty flavor. The caraway seeds in the rye bread burst between my teeth. I laid my head against Mason’s shoulder and swooned, chewing with eyes closed in order to savor. I’d never had a sandwich so delicious.

We ate until we were thirsty, but Mason wasn’t comfortable swigging from the bottle of wine in the park. We decided to cross the Petit Pont back to our hotel in the Latin Quarter.
The Hotel Esmeralda dates from 1640. Huge yellow boulders, mortared together, formed the outside walls. We laughed that such a place would never survive an earthquake. A single steep, narrow stairway wound up from the lobby to the warren of rooms. We saw no such thing as a smoke detector or a fire escape. We found the place charming.

In our little room, I’d been reading The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I’d read the book as a child, but it came so much more alive for me now, in a hotel named for the Gypsy dancing girl across the river from the cathedral. Still, I’d had to put the book down in a moment of horror when I reached the crones gossiping over the Foundling’s Bed. On viewing the child Quasimodo, one of the women said, “I should guess that it’s a beast, an animal — the offspring of a Jew and a sow — something, at any rate, which is not Christian.”

My God, I thought. How could people have said such a thing, and meant it? I know that fiction does not equal reality, but twentieth-century bigotry had been so much worse than Victor Hugo could have imagined.

*

That frosty January evening, our small steam-heated room remained chilly. Mason and I snuggled together in our clothes on the soft bed, pulling the blankets up over our knees. We each drank deeply from the bottle of wine, which turned out to be the perfect complement to the sandwich: rich and thick and slightly sweet. It chased the robust flavors of pastrami on rye across my tongue and touched a flush to my cheeks. We rested the wine bottle on the rickety nightstand and held the remainders of the sandwich carefully, so that pastrami did not slip between our fingers.

I thought I was in heaven, even before Mason produced dessert. Generally, I don’t like cheesecake. Mason regarded this, with amused resignation, as a character flaw. I agreed to sample a bite of this cheesecake, only a bite, when he held it toward me on his fork.

Jo Goldenberg’s was like no other cheesecake I’d ever sampled. It melted inside my mouth, exquisitely sweet and creamy. It tasted not too rich, not at all cloying. The texture was just dense enough to be solid, but not gummy like the cheesecake my mom made from a box. The subtle aftertaste of lemon lingered on my tongue.

I found it impossible not to watch as the fork traveled from the dwindling slice in the small white box to Mason’s mouth. He laughed and fed me the final bite.

And then I was in heaven: safe in the arms of the man I loved, cozy and sated in an old hotel in Paris, tasting the trace of sweetness on my husband’s lips.

“Pastrami in Paris” was originally published on Trip Lit in January 2003. It was reprinted in 2014 as part of All You Need is Morbid on Wattpad.

***

Death's Garden001About the Death’s Garden project:

I am getting ready to finish the Death’s Garden project. If there is a cemetery that has touched your life, please get in touch SOON. I would love to hear from you, particularly if there is one you visited on vacation — or if you got married in one. The submissions guidelines are here.

2 Comments

Posted in Cemetery essay, Deaths Garden Revisited

Tagged , , , , , ,

Exhuming Corpses for Fun and Profit

Posted on October 28, 2016 | 3 comments
Winged skull photo by Loren Rhoads.

Winged skull photo by Loren Rhoads.

by Paul Stansfield

Whenever I tell someone that I’m an archaeologist, the typical response is something like, “Cool. I’ve always been interested in that.” Then when I describe a common site, their eyes invariably glaze over. I certainly understand it: they’re used to seeing dramatic things like Egyptian tombs or Mayan temples on television or in National Geographic. A few projectile points or the remains of a firepit (things that contract archaeologists like myself commonly encounter) usually aren’t interesting to a layperson.

However, mention that you’ve exhumed graves and your audience usually perks up. Many people pepper you with questions. The ones that don’t ask anything usually are doing so because they find the concept revolting, but not tedious.

Burial projects aren’t that common in my line of work, but even so, in my twenty years in the field, I’ve spent over two years exhuming. The jobs have ranged from a weeklong project investigating a tiny, six-grave family cemetery to a nine-month-long job with over 4000 bodies, which required a crew of 50 to remove them. The jobs have been in the Mid-Atlantic part of the country and were fairly recent historic burials: early 1800s up to the 1960s.

For a variety of reasons, the maps and overall burial records of the cemeteries were spotty. We had only a rough idea of where grave shafts were. Excavation of the graves was almost always begun by backhoes; the machines would remove most of the soil atop the graves until the outlines of the grave shafts could be seen. (Oh, I know the expression is “six feet under” but clearly, especially in pre-backhoe days and in areas with rocky or compact soils, many gravediggers figured three or four feet was deep enough.)

In some cases, graves were revealed by soil changes; for some, the actual coffin outline was apparent. For others, the presence of bones showed the grave’s location. Workers would typically place wooden stakes at the head and foot of each shaft, sometimes with nails connected by string that traced the outline of the actual shaft. Each grave shaft would then be numbered, its location mapped, and surveying teams would try to match up the graves to the existing maps (if any).

Then it was time to actually dig up the graves. The excavators, typically divided into two- or three-person teams, dug with shovels and discarded the dirt produced, until they encountered bone. At this point, the digging team used trowels, dustpans, and brushes to completely uncover the skeleton. Soil lying directly adjacent to the bones was passed through quarter-inch screen to recover any bits of bone or small artifacts (such as nails or buttons) not seen during the excavation. After the skeleton was uncovered and cleaned off as well as possible, a photograph was taken of it. (On smaller jobs, when we had more time to spend on individual graves, more photographs and drawings were done.)

Then the bones were removed. As they came out, basic scientific data was noted about them, either by a professional osteologist (bone specialist) or by the excavating team themselves, depending on the project. This information included the body’s approximate age at death, sex, and stature, if any or all of these were possible to determine (and many times they weren’t), along with any signs of disease or injury. The bones were placed in cardboard boxes (sometimes wrapped in plastic bags), along with plastic bags containing the coffin nails, metal hinges — and for some projects, pieces of the coffin itself — and any personal non-human remains found in the grave. These boxes were then usually reburied , typically in huge concrete burial vaults. For one job, they were cremated.

Several factors often complicated this simple procedure. The worst was water. Many of the cemeteries had relatively high water tables, so a grave shaft was sometimes moist or even completely underwater. We would use sponges, buckets, or water pumps, depending on the severity, but in some cases, there was no way to remove the water. You just had to do the best you could and hope no bones were accidentally left in the murky lake facing you. Another common problem was soil heavily infested with rocks and/or compacted by heavy machinery running over it. To get through these soils, pickaxes were necessary, which obviously increased the chance of inadvertently damaging the bones. Other obstructions were construction-related, such as concrete light posts or highway supports carelessly punched through the grave shaft. Those wreaked considerable havoc on the body inside.

The burial practices of the time period also complicated our job. The average grave shaft had more than one body in it (the most I heard of was seven). Frequently, the coffins had rotted to such a degree that all the bodies tumbled into each other in the shaft. It was often difficult — sometimes impossible — to tell which bone went with which person.

Finally, the preservation of the skeletons varied tremendously. Some were nearly pristine, with every single bone still present and firm. Unfortunately, these were rare exceptions. Most had suffered significant decay. Sometimes the few remaining bones were either powdery, mushy, or thin and fragile as tissue paper. The ribs, vertebrae (spine bones), hand bones, and foot bones were more rarely recovered, with the skull and long bones—the femur (thigh bone), tibia and fibula (lower leg bones), humerus (upper arm bone), ulna and radius (lower arm bones), and pelvis being the most resistant to decay.

Notice that I’ve only mentioned bones so far. Flesh was rarely found. By far the most common organ recovered was the brain. Other tissue remains I saw were sheets of fat (which resembled grayish globs) and kidneys/liver (which looked like reddish-yellow cornmeal).

Hair was rare as well, but every so often it would be recovered—sometimes entire ponytails, eyebrows, and even, disturbingly, pubic hairs. One body in a cracked concrete vault (which really helped preserve the deceased) also had extensive skin and ligaments. That was one of the very few bodies that had a strong bad odor: reminiscent of pickles, very vinegary. And finger- and toenails were exceedingly uncommon—to the relief of much of the crew, as many found these body parts oddly repugnant.

Some pathologies—illnesses or injuries—leave evidence on the bones. Although these were rare, all told we saw quite a few different injuries and conditions. Most of the injuries were bone breaks, sometimes showing healing with bad settings, which must have been excruciating. One man obviously had been hit by a large object such as a train; practically every long bone showed the distinctive spiral fractures which would result from such a collision. Another man had clearly been murdered; he had a blunt force trauma on the front of his skull, along with two gunshot wounds, also to the skull. One of the bullets, a .32 caliber, was recovered. It must have been lodged within him.

As for diseases, tuberculosis was by far the most common one seen, with its characteristic pits in the long bones, clavicles, and vertebrae. Several cases of syphilis were also found, including one man whose striations (bands) on his teeth revealed that he had congenital syphilis. Another skeleton’s pelvis was extremely thick and looked like coral, indicating cancer. Some bone abnormalities showed how a disease had been identified; we saw dozens of bones, usually skulls, with straight cuts through them that indicated that they had been autopsied. Other skulls with smooth holes bored into them, which told us that the person had been the recipient of trepanation.

Skeletons with extraordinarily rare conditions were also exhumed. Several microcephalic skulls were recovered, whose owners in pre-PC days were probably called “pinheads.” Another woman’s pelvis yielded a bony, slightly spongy softball-sized mass: either an ovarian tumor or a reabsorbed placenta/fetus. One radius with an extra “prong” was something our osteologist had never seen before.

Several other unusual items appeared in grave shafts as well. Most unsettling of all was the jar with a five-month-old fetus still preserved in formaldehyde. One grave contained a skeleton, along with a metal box, which contained the cremated ashes of another person. Also strange were the tiny coffins containing nothing but an amputated limb, which seems bizarre and absurd to me. I guess that’s the one funeral in which the “deceased” can give their own eulogy. What do they say: “My right leg was one of my closest friends. I’ll always remember its generous nature and delightful sense of humor”? One cemetery had a “witch’s bottle” buried in it—a magic charm consisting of a bottle filled with nails (and sometimes, bodily substances, such as urine, feces, menstrual blood, etc). This was usually evil magic to break up a relationship, so the witch could steal a partner. (I don’t know what excuse the witch used if the victim caught them collecting waste from their outhouse!)

Most burials contained no non-human remains, other than coffin parts. However, clothing was not uncommon; usually it was scraps and buttons, but occasionally certain articles were recognizable, such as a pair of pants or a dress. Shoes, belts, hats, and even underwear were sometimes found. Personal items were more unusual still, but we saw a variety: rings, necklaces, pendants, and earrings; religious items like rosary beads, crosses, crucifixes, and saint medallions; change purses and coins; matches; shaving kits; makeup kits; military medals; a truss; pocket watches; penknives; toothbrushes; combs; bottles and jars (including embalming fluid bottles, evidently included by a lazy mortician); dentures; gold teeth; a harmonica; clay pipes; and a doll. The rare glass eyes recovered usually caused a stir—it’s somewhat alarming to uncover a skull that appears to be staring back at you!

A common question we got asked is “Did it bother you to dig up dead bodies?” I’d have to say that for most of us, the answer would be “No.” Certain things bothered some or even most of the crew a bit, like say, a baby’s skeleton, or brains, or particular smells, but this seemed temporary; I can only recall a person or two who left a project early due to not being able to handle it psychologically. Clearly, I think that people had a good idea of what to expect when they signed on for this type of job. Perhaps the fact that we were basically dealing with skeletons and not fleshy bodies (usually) helped us to distance ourselves enough to get through the project. And yes, we’re human—countless jokes were told throughout the projects. The humor ranged from innocent, “Alas poor Yoric, we knew him well” to references in bad taste and kidding around about necrophilia. Possibly these were coping mechanisms, or simply our way of passing the time.

All joking aside, I was offended by the circumstances which warranted the projects in the first place. Several of them were like the movie Poltergeist, in that people or organizations claimed to have moved the bodies at a previous time, but had only actually removed a handful, along with every one of the headstones or grave markers. One place in New Jersey had obviously had a machine tear through over 60 graves.  It pushed the bones into a big pile, in a scene unfortunately reminiscent of the movie The Killing Fields. Furthermore, the initial reburial spot for one of the jobs had to be abandoned because a quick inspection of the cemetery showed over a hundred pieces of human bone scattered on the surface, near the burial vaults! Apparently, the cemetery’s caretaker was blind and never mowed the lawn. These incidents show a serious lack of respect for the dead.

In closing, my feelings about digging up the dead are as follows: Certainly I think that cemeteries should be well-maintained and secure against theft or vandalism. If alternate areas for the construction of buildings or roads are feasible, these should be opted for. Any transference of bodies is disrespectful to a degree. I’m sure that most people don’t like the idea of having their — or their relatives’ — remains exhumed, picked up, probably jostled, possibly damaged slightly, and finally moved to what is in most cases a mass grave or burial vault, with their bones encased in a cardboard box.

The unfortunate reality is that, in some cases, alternate areas aren’t feasible, occasionally due to issues like the discovery of forgotten, unmarked graveyards after construction has begun. In these cases, I think that companies and states should do what was done on the projects I’ve described: remove the bodies, using all reasonable care, and rebury them in another, safe cemetery.

That said, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy these cemetery projects. Even with all the physical and emotional issues I’ve mentioned, I still do find it interesting. Perhaps part of this can be attributed to a certain degree of morbidity on my part. “I never feel so alive as when I’m digging up the dead” is one of my jokey (perhaps of questionable taste) quotes. However, I always try to do the job as best I can and limit the negative aspects of what is overall an unfortunate situation.

This essay was originally published in Morbid Curiosity #8. It’s reprinted here with Paul’s kind permission.

***

mt-washingtonDuring his day job as an archaeologist, Paul Stansfield does everything from finding 2000-year-old prehistoric projectile points, removing 150-year-old feces from historic outhouses, and digging up Civil War artifacts on battlefields. Otherwise, he likes to write, especially horror fiction. He’s had over 20 short stories published, in magazines such as Morbid Curiosity, Cthulhu Sex Magazine, Under the Bed, In D’tale, and The Literary Hatchet, among others. He also has stories in four horror anthologies: Undead Living (Sunbury Press), Coming Back (Thirteen O’Clock Press), Creature Stew (Papa Bear Press), and Creepy Campfire Quarterly Vol. 1 (EMP Publishing). A fifth anthology, The Prison Compendium (also from EMP Publishing) is due out this December 13, 2016. His personal blog address is http://paulstansfield.blogspot.com. His hobbies include drinking craft beer, tennis, and caring for the humongous tapeworm that lives in his intestines.

***

Death's Garden001About the Death’s Garden project:

For the next couple months, I’m planning to put a cemetery essay up every Friday. If there is a cemetery that has touched your life, I would love to hear from you, particularly if there is one you visited on vacation — or if you got married in one. The submissions guidelines are here.

3 Comments

Posted in Cemetery essay, Deaths Garden Revisited

Tagged , , ,

Death’s Garden: So Shall You Be

Posted on October 21, 2016 | Leave a comment

loren-mason-kutna-horaI wanted to do something special to celebrate my thirty-fifth birthday. Simply going to Prague seemed enough, until Mason read me a bit from the Cadogan City Guide: “The ossuary dates from 1511, when a half-blind monk began gathering together all the bones from abolished graves and putting them in the crypt. It sounds an unenviable task, but it had a practical purpose and was the product of strange times; what’s harder to understand is why, as late as 1870, a woodcarver was hired to arrange the 40,000 sets of bones into pleasing patterns.”

I had to see that. I decided to mark my birthday among the dead.

The journey itself proved something of an adventure. Even though the city of Kutná Hora lay only seventy-odd kilometers outside Prague, no buses went there directly. We’d have to transfer in Kolín. The bus out of Prague was top of the line, complete with magazine pockets and reading lights. The second bus, from Kolín to Kutná Hora, was a good thirty years older, with worn green knit seat covers, a linoleum floor, and a pinup behind the driver’s seat of a blond German girl whose white nightie had slipped off her unusually large breasts. The bus wove down a single lane, meandering through pretty and mostly uninhabited farmland. At one point, a dump truck met us on a blind curve and the woman behind me said the Czech equivalent of “Yikes!” My thoughts exactly.

kutna-hora-chandelierAt Kutná Hora, the “station” turned out to be a collection of bus stops. The map of town, behind its yellowed plastic, had been defaced enough to be unreadable. I guessed that this burg wasn’t as big a tourist destination as I’d thought. We followed the other passengers, hoping they’d lead us toward the center of town, where we might get directions in English.

Judging from the bus line, Kutná Hora had come a long way down in the world. It began as a small mining village. In the second half of the thirteenth century, villagers discovered rich veins of silver. The Czech king took over the mines and Kutná Hora (“mining mountain” in Czech) became the second most important town in Bohemia. The Prague groschen, a silver coin circulated throughout Europe, was minted here. By the fourteenth century, five or six tons of silver were extracted per year, making the king the richest ruler in Central Europe. Eventually the silver veins tapped out and the mint closed in 1727. Since then, the town lapsed into being a peaceful backwater with some world-class medieval churches.

We walked past signs pointing toward kostnice, the ossuary. I can only read two Czech words, the other being hrbitov or cemetery. Mason and I found a tobacco shop, as the guidebook suggested, but the couple inside spoke no English. We managed to ask for a map and they gave us directions in Czech, explaining that we could walk the kilometer to Sedlec easier than waiting for the local bus. For four people who spoke no common language, we had an extremely pleasant interaction. This birthday would be the best one yet.

*

The modern road to Sedlec, the suburb where the ossuary is located, led past some charmless Communist apartment blocks, through grassy vacant lots, then toward a French-style cathedral. The Cistercian community at Sedlec predates the town of Kutná Hora by nearly two hundred years. Early in the twelfth century, the Burgundian monastery of Cîteaux reformed the old Benedictine monastic rule so that physical labor became an acceptable way to praise God. Since they considered active beautification of the world comparable to prayer, the monks made everything their monasteries owned and used. The Cistercian movement spread quickly across Europe. Founded in 1141, Sedlec has the oldest Cistercian monastery in the Czech Republic. You can bet that the monks were thrilled when their neighbors discovered silver.

As we neared the church, signs directed us to turn left for the ossuary. How unexpected! I’d assumed the Cistercians built their ossuary in a crypt below their cathedral.

rhoads-plague-column

The Plague Column in Kutna Hora.

The street turned again at a Plague Column and I knew we were in the right place. Ten years after Kutná Hora received its royal charter, thirty thousand bodies — roughly the population of London at the time — had already been buried in the Sedlec graveyard. In 1318 the Black Death increased that number immensely.

 

At the close of the fourteenth century, the Cistercians build a small Gothic church in the middle of their immense graveyard. Called the Church of All Saints, it had an empty crypt downstairs and a chapel above. Because the graveyard was filling so quickly, the Cistercians decided to dig up the oldest bodies and store their bones inside the church, leaving the ground outside available for new burials. This sort of exhumation occurred commonly in Medieval Europe. The Church proclaimed that, to have any hope of Heaven, the dead had to be buried in holy ground. With Papal permission, the ground part could be discarded. An ossuary in a church was still holy, even if the bones remained visible for all to see.

Only a tiny churchyard remains of the once-vast graveyard. Most of the modern monuments were high-gloss black marble engraved with names picked out in white, but a solitary granite muse stood among them. On another grave, a little girl angel kissed the cheek of a little marble boy. The strangest marker was an automobile’s steering wheel surmounted by a red star on a pole, a memento of the Soviet regime.

rhoads-steering-wheelIn 1421, Protestant troops led by Jan Hus attacked Sedlec, martyred the monks, burned the cathedral, and plundered the cemetery church. New monks arrived in 1454 to live in the monastic ruins, but the little church continued in a state near collapse until the order saved the money to renovate in 1661. Another thorough restoration and reconstruction was completed in 1870, when they rearranged the bones. Enclosed in scaffolding when we visited, the Church of All Saints looked to be about the size of a modest two-story house. In the latest remodeling of the original chapel, they seemed to be re-coppering the cupolas atop its twin spires.

When we arrived, the door to the chapel stood open. That seemed promising. The guidebook included directions for how to find someone with keys to open the place, but we appreciated not needing to track anyone down.

A large dark-haired matron sat at a table inside the door. “English?” she asked, already bored with our answer. We bought tickets for sixty Czech crowns, about two dollars. She said a photo pass cost another 30 Kc, which we gladly paid. Postcards and viewbooks and a guide to the ossuary in English covered her table. I was too excited to look at them. It had taken us nearly three hours to reach the place. I wanted to see it!

She handed us a laminated one-page explanation in English of the ossuary’s history. The graveyard had been sanctified in 1278, when Abbot Heidenreich brought a jar of dirt back from Golgotha, the hill outside Jerusalem on which Christ is said to have been crucified. With its handful of dirt, the little graveyard became the most popular resting place in Central Europe. People literally came to Sedlec to die. Corpses got carted in from hundreds of miles away. The graveyard had originally extended all the way down the block to the cathedral, but the church sold land when times were hard.

bone chalice

My photo of the bone chalice in Kutna Hora.

Above the staircase to the crypt, the bone decor began. A daisy chain of skulls, crossed bones wired beneath them, traced the arch. In alcoves on either side of the foyer stood chalices assembled from bones. Long bones from the arms formed the bases, topped with a layer of shoulder blades. Then the lacy architecture of tailbones supported a complex arrangement of smaller bones: round knobs I couldn’t identify, flat disks that might have been kneecaps, the slender bones of forearms. The bells of the cups had been shaped from thighbones and topped with skulls. It took my breath away.

As cool as the inside of a refrigerator, the relatively dark chapel didn’t smell of death, or rot, or even of mold. There wasn’t a hint of corruption in the crypt. Despite the stained and crumbling plaster on the walls, the scent seemed curiously neutral.

At the foot of the steps, the ossuary’s designer had signed his name and the date of completion in bones. Frantisek Rint had been a woodcarver before he decorated the ossuary. I wondered how he got the job. How does one train to make art of the dead?

Each corner of the crypt held a huge pyramid of bones. I suffered a momentary flicker of disappointment. With forty thousand skeletons, each with an excess of two hundred bones, I had expected to see many objects arranged from bones. But this was not a catacomb in the Parisian sense, not a labyrinth of tunnels full of bones stretching away underground. The Sedlec ossuary filled only a room. A small room. You could twirl around in the center of it and see the bones of all 40,000 people, most of them stacked in these four huge pyramids. We’d traveled halfway around the world for this?

Still, the pyramids were huge. Throughout the world, throughout history, pyramids linked heaven and earth and symbolized earthly reality governed by heavenly order. Suspended above the pyramids hung tarnished silver crowns, signifying the promise of Heaven for those who’d died as Christians.

rhoads-pyramid

It’s hard to get a sense of scale from this, but those are adult skulls. Extrapolate.

Small wooden signs instructed us not to touch. Like I’d want to topple that! Cages enclosed the pyramids, ornate iron bars reaching floor to ceiling. I wonder when they’d been installed to keep back the hoi polloi.

My disappointment soon passed and I reached for my camera. An eight-armed chandelier of bones blossomed in the center of the room, as fragile and delicate as lace. Who had cleaned all those bones? I wondered. Their uniform whiteness denied that they’d ever been buried in the dirt. Jawbones strung end-to-end formed loops like links of chain. The gentle slats of shoulder blades fanned out to form platters which supported skulls. The intricate architecture of tailbones provided a repeating motif. The craftsmanship that went into the chandelier stunned me. Its beauty changed me forever even as I stood there trying to make sense of it.

What inspired someone to make something like this? I’ve seen mobiles made of every bone in a cat, boiled clean and hung from filament: the mystic form of a cat. I’ve seen medical skeletons, wired together and hung from a hook bolted through their skulls. But this: skeletons scattered, disarticulated into design elements…what would possess a person to do this to the dead?

It didn’t seem sacrilegious. In fact, the overwhelming sense of the place was peaceful. Contemplative.

I wondered how the raw materials had been arranged for Rint to work from: a pile of skulls, a pile of ribs, a pile of long bones? Or did the woodcarver paw through the jumble of skeletons until — aha! — he found just the decorative object he needed? How familiar had he been with human anatomy before he began? Did he recognize what all he worked with or didn’t he spare it a thought, reducing the bones to mere sizes and shapes?

The chandelier hung maybe seven feet above our heads — low enough that it seemed you could jump up and make it swing. Candleholders perched atop the skulls, but no trace of wax marred their perfect round blankness. The Cadogan book said that, until very recently, the church used to light candles in the chandelier on November 2, All Souls’ Day — celebrated in Mexico as the Day of the Dead. A priest used to intone the requiem mass inside the charnel house. Apparently, church officials decided that the masses were “out of step with modern Catholicism,” but services are still sometimes held in the chapel. I wish I’d thought to write ahead for a schedule. That would have been something to see.

Below the chandelier rose four obelisks adorned with skulls and heavy silver sconces. Since ancient times, the obelisk has been considered the architectural materialization of a ray of light. It symbolizes the victory of light over darkness, the supremacy of God’s Heaven. Atop one of these obelisks hunkered a fat pink cherub with stubby gold wings. Its hyper-Romantic cuddliness disturbed me more than the bones did — it seemed so artificial and unnecessary, deeply out of place.

On the back of the obelisk farthest from the guard, kids had scrawled on the skulls with black felt-tips. I felt too scandalized to read the inscriptions. I can’t grasp the urge to tag a stranger’s bones. Did the graffitist feel he cheated Death? My reaction was visceral, outraged. Disrespecting the dead, to me, seemed worse than defacing the church.

Beyond the obelisks opened an alcove with a crucifix. The pallid Christ drooping there seemed drained of blood. His head lolled forward, devoid of will. His mouth hung slack. It dawned on me that this Christ was dead.

I’d read about such things, but never seen one. Although I grew up in a Presbyterian church, where the crucifix was anathema, I understand that generally crucifixes represent Christ in torment, suffering for the sins of the world. The suffering of the representative before me had ended. His spirit had moved on. Pinned to the cross like a butterfly in a museum case — what, I wondered, did this corpse of Christ signify?

He was the only flesh-clad cadaver in this cellar full of anonymous bones. However, the dead Christ wasn’t there to be worshipped. I saw no chairs in which to sit and pray, no cushion on which to kneel.

The sense was not that the mystery had been performed, but that it was yet to come. It reminded me of the Good Friday celebration I saw in Athens. The sense I had in this chapel, more than anything, was the pressure of anticipation. All these Christians died with the certainty that they would wait until the Trump of Doom sounded before they being called into the presence of God and judged worthy to enter Heaven. The idea that Grandma waits for us in Heaven is a new one: prior to the eighteenth century, everyone went to the grave to rest until the end of time and the final judgment.

At the time of my visit in 1998, the millennium bore down upon us. These dead had waited six hundred years to reach their just rewards. I wondered if the peace I felt in the chapel would change once the millennium passed without bringing the apocalypse. Would the 40,000 spirits grow restive, angry? Or would they continue to wait until God called them home? I suppose the dead are nothing if not patient.

I am not patient. I hope to be busy until the moment my death catches me. I do not want to wait in a hole in the ground, even somewhere as beautiful as the Church of All Saints, for the possibility of resurrection. If this life is all I have, then I had better get busy making the most of it. It was a sobering thought for a birthday, one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.

This was published in my book All You Need is Morbid, which is available for free on Wattpad. It was originally published in Morbid Curiosity #3.

More information on the Sedlec Ossuary is here.

Books about ossuaries on Cemetery Travel:

Memento Mori

The Empire of Death

Skulls and Skeletons

***

Death's Garden001About the Death’s Garden project:

For the next couple months, I’m planning to put a cemetery essay up every Friday. If there is a cemetery that has touched your life, I would love to hear from you, particularly if there is one you visited on vacation — or if you got married in one. The submissions guidelines are here.

Leave a comment

Posted in Cemetery essay, Deaths Garden Revisited

Tagged , , , , ,

A Restless Wind is Blowing Through Highgate

Posted on September 20, 2016 | 7 comments

 

winterNo one agrees where this story started or rather, there are as many beginnings as there are storytellers.

In the early days, Hampstead Heath was the only thing sinister about the area. Highwaymen flourished there, like Dick Turpin, whose ghost still loiters ’round the pub. The village of Highgate stood on a tall hill overlooking the city of London, sprawled across the river plain below. Highgate’s name described its function: it served as point of entry for farm goods coming from the countryside to feed and clothe the metropolis.

Following the nondenominational fashion set by Pere-Lachaise in Paris, Highgate Cemetery was founded in 1839. The “garden cemetery” was envisioned as a place of beauty where Londoners could escape the smoke and dirt of their city. It offered controlled nature — serene, park-like, and safe — beside the wilderness of Hampstead Heath.

The cemetery made the area fashionable. While it was no Kensal Green — final home of a Prince of England, William Makepeace Thackery, Wilkie Collins, Lady Byron, and friends of Shelley’s — Highgate managed to land Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Radclyffe Hall, the family of Charles Dickens, as well as various balloonists, menagerists, scientists, and philosophers like Karl Marx.

Among the artistic souls buried in the western half of the graveyard was Elizabeth Siddal, muse, mistress, and eventually wife to Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A hat-maker’s assistant, beautiful Lizzie had been wooed by the dashing Italian immigrant, who refused to settle down after he’d won her heart. Increasingly depressed after a stillborn child, Lizzie took her own life with an overdose of laudanum in 1862. At the graveside service, distraught Rossetti placed a handwritten volume of poems on the pillow just before the coffin lid was sealed.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Venus VerticordiaRossetti’s fortunes faltered after his muse removed herself from the mortal plane. He became convinced that he was going blind and losing his painterly skill, that he was destined to be remembered as a poet rather than as a painter. His questionably scrupulous agent persuaded Rossetti that he could cement his reputation if only he’d publish the poems consigned to Lizzie’s grave. In October 1869, permission was granted to exhume the coffin, as long as it was done by night and did not upset the neighbors or patrons of the cemetery. By flickering torchlight, workmen peeled back the damp rich dirt of England.

This is perhaps where our story begins in earnest: When Lizzie’s coffin was forced open, all that remained of her beauty was the silken mass of her auburn mane. The grave robbers brushed tendrils of hair from the silk-bound manuscript, which was fumigated, then published by the profligate poet. Lizzie’s sad remains were returned to the cold autumn ground.

The story was leaked, possibly by one of the horrified torchbearers, to Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper. Elizabeth Miller in her book Dracula: Sense and Nonsense theorizes that Bram Stoker read the news while working on Dracula, since the paper also reviewed the Lyceum’s production of King Lear, with which Stoker was involved. If that’s the case, Lizzie Siddal served in death as another man’s muse, transmuted into Lucy Westenra and given life beyond the grave. David J. Skal reports in V is for Vampire that Stoker was once a neighbor of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s.

Whether Highgate Cemetery was the churchyard described by Stoker remains a matter of debate. In Dracula, Van Helsing says, “Lucy lies in the tomb of her kin, a lordly death-house in a lonely churchyard, away from teeming London; where the air is fresh, and the sun rises over Hampstead Hill, and where wild flowers grow of their own accord.” The fictional newspaper reports of Lucy’s postmortem attacks on children are headlined Hampstead, the town west of the heath. Highgate lies on its eastern edge.

Whatever the true inspiration, the century turned. England endured World War I, in which one of every three soldiers perished. At the war’s end, the influenza pandemic swept the country, killing thousands. The young and vigorous, plucked in their prime, glutted the nation’s graveyards.

World War II finished the job, wiping out most of a generation of men. In the first decades of the century, whole families had ceased to exist. No one survived to tend the graves; no money came from new burials to pay the army of gardeners. In the 1940s, Highgate was abandoned to nature. And Nature ran rampant.

By the end of the 1960s, Highgate Cemetery was choked with weeds, shadowed by a dense forest of ornamental trees, and colonized by wildlife from the Heath that included foxes, hedgehogs, rabbits, songbirds, and hundreds of insect varieties.

taste-the-blood-of-dracula

In 1968, the cemetery featured in Taste the Blood of Dracula, one of Hammer Studio’s costume thrillers starring Christopher Lee as the immortal count. In the film, three bored businessmen contact a lord whose family cut him off for practicing Satanism in the family chapel. The men acquire a vial of dried blood and Dracula’s cape, then travel by carriage to Highgate. They climb over a fallen tree, fight through the underbrush, and find themselves at the creaking gate of the Egyptian Avenue. They navigate the sunken catacombs, then enter a towering mausoleum (whose interior existed only on a soundstage) to reconstitute the eponymous count. So, perhaps, our story begins.

In March 1969, the British Psychic and Occult Society heard tales of a tall black apparition amidst the graves at sunset or after dark. The original sighting was traced to an accountant referred to as Thornton in the Society’s report, Beyond the Highgate Vampire. Thornton had been exploring the cemetery. At dusk, as he attempted to leave, he became hopelessly lost. A sudden sense of dread caused him to turn. Over him loomed a dark specter that transfixed him with its glare. He lost all sense of time and felt drained of energy when it finally released him.

The Society investigated the cemetery. Mostly, it discovered widespread vandalism: “vaults broken open and coffins literally smashed apart.” A vault on the main pathway had been forced open and the coffins inside set afire.

img_6099

Highgate Cemetery, photographed in June 2016 by Loren Rhoads.

Though this clearly had a human origin, sightings of the dark figure continued. The Society decided to perform a séance in the cemetery at midnight on August 17, 1970. They cast a protective circle on the ground, sealing it with consecrated water and salt. After the séance began, they heard muffled voices coming toward them. The police had decided belatedly to patrol the cemetery. Despite the dangers of leaving the circle before the spirits were banished, Society members scattered. Society president David Farrant was arrested as he tried to slip past the police. Among the paraphernalia he carried was a short wooden stake with a string for measuring out the magic circle. This was taken as evidence that he had been hunting vampires.

Farrant was acquitted, since legally Highgate was open to the public, even at midnight. The magistrate likened the hunt for vampires to the search for the Loch Ness Monster: foolish, but harmless.

In his book, Farrant meanders off on a justification of his Wiccan faith and the evils of Christianity. This is at odds with the photo of him included in the booklet (published 1997) “hunting a vampire” clutching a crucifix and “Holy Bible.” Apparently his beliefs about the efficacy of the crucifix have evolved over the last three decades. He posits a ley line that runs from a haunted pub in Highgate Village called Ye Olde Gatehouse under the old “yew” tree in the center of the cemetery’s columbarium. (In all other references, the tree is a cedar — hence, the area’s designation as the Circle of Lebanon.)

The British Psychic and Occult Society officially closed its examination in 1973 due, Farrant writes, to the “concern of the cemetery authorities and the police who saw the Society investigation as being responsible for a marked increase in damage and desecration at the cemetery.” He neglects to mention that he was in court again in June 1974. The prosecution contended that “Farrant was the vampire of Highgate,” according to Rosemary Ellen Guiley in her book Vampires Among Us. Farrant was charged with maliciously damaging a memorial to the dead, interfering with a dead body, tampering with witnesses by sending them poppets, and possession of a firearm. The last charge earned him several years in prison.

Perhaps this was neither the beginning nor the end of the story. Sean Manchester, then president of the British Occult Society (no relation to the British Psychic and Occult Society), claims to have begun investigating phenomena at Highgate Cemetery in 1967. Manchester interviewed two 16-year-old schoolgirls who reported seeing graves inside Highgate yawn open and corpses rise. Afterward, one of the girls, Elizabeth Wojdyla, suffered nightmares where a corpse-faced man tried to get into her bedroom.

When Manchester caught up with Elizabeth again in 1969, “her features had grown cadaverous.” Her neck had two “highly inflamed swellings” with holes in their centers. Manchester vowed to rescue her from the vampire obviously feeding on her.

In his quest, Manchester encountered another young woman whom he believed was under vampiric attack. In his book The Highgate Vampire, he refers to her as Lusia. Like Lucy Westenra, Lusia walked in her sleep. Manchester followed her from her apartment into Highgate Cemetery, up the “haunted icy path” through the Egyptian Avenue to the catacombs in the Circle of Lebanon. Lusia paused before one of the tombs and struggled to open it. Manchester flung a crucifix between her and the door. The girl collapsed and had to be carried home. Her parents must have been thrilled when Manchester showed up with her.

Manchester went to the press in February 1970. He told the Hampstead and Highgate Express, “We would like to exorcise the vampire by the traditional and approved manner — drive a stake through its heart with one blow just after dawn, chop off its head with a gravedigger’s shovel, and burn what remains.”

When no volunteers stepped forward to help, Manchester approached the media again in March, intruding while David Farrant was being interviewed by a television crew about the “hauntings” inside Highgate. Farrant stresses that he took great care to avoid the term vampire, but a “theatrical character” announced that he intended to lead a vampire hunt the following night.

Hundreds of people showed up to assist. The police arrived with spotlights. Despite the carnival atmosphere, Manchester and an assistant chopped a hole through the roof of the tomb in the catacombs. Manchester was lowered by rope into the vault, where he found three empty coffins. He sprinkled each with garlic and holy water, then encircled each with salt, according to Carol Page’s Bloodlust: Conversations with Real Vampires.

The exorcism didn’t halt the desecration of graves, the mutilation of corpses, or the slaughter of foxes and other small animals found drained of blood in the cemetery. In fact, after the exorcism, someone dragged a woman’s corpse from her grave, chopped off her head, drove a stake her through the heart, and left her body lying in the middle of a pathway.

In the winter of 1973, Manchester eventually traced the King Vampire to an abandoned mansion in north London (already investigated by Farrant’s BPOS as haunted), where he discovered an enormous black casket. Manchester and his assistant Arthur dragged it outside. Manchester kicked the coffin lid off and … Well, perhaps it’s best to let him tell the story: “Burning, fierce eyes beneath black furrowed brows stared with hellish reflection. Yellow at the edges with blood-red centres, they were unlike any other beast of prey.”

Manchester staked the corpse through its heart, shielding his ears “as a terrible roar emitted from the bowels of hell.” The corpse turned to brown slime. The stench was so awful, Arthur forgot to work his camera and the event passed unrecorded.

The two men built a pyre, tossed the coffin on, doused it with gasoline, and set it ablaze. Incredibly, no one in London noticed the explosion, the smell, or the smoke.

While he’s never been officially charged with vandalism or “interfering with a corpse,” Manchester remains persona non grata at Highgate Cemetery.

In 1975, the Friends of Highgate Cemetery formed after the cemetery’s owner shut down the Western Cemetery for economic reasons. FOHC volunteers worked on Saturday afternoons to clear brambles, fell invasive trees, and reopen access to gravesites. Eventually, FOHC bought the entire cemetery. They now sell guidebooks and offer tours to raise money for their work.

Which is where I come into the story. I visited Highgate for the second time in June 1995. I was determined to see the western side of the graveyard, where the Rossettis and Lizzie Siddal are buried. Outside the large “undertaker’s gothic” chapel, I paid three pounds to join a guided tour. Our guide explained that a tunnel runs from the Anglican chapel under Swain’s Lane to the “newer” eastern side of the cemetery (where the first burial occurred in 1860) so that a coffin never leaves consecrated ground once the body has been blessed.
The Friends of Highgate treat the western side of the cemetery as “managed wilderness.” Simply cutting back the ivy would be a full-time job, so they only trim enough of the brush to keep some paths open and remove trees whose roots threaten monuments. The British National Trust and British Heritage have both funded conservation efforts. For the most part, the Friends maintain the cemetery in its romantic decay. Only in the most extreme cases, like the Circle of Lebanon, do they resort to restoration.

 

img_6114

Highgate’s Egyptian Avenue, photographed in June 2016 by Loren Rhoads.

One of the highlights of the tour was finally seeing the Egyptian Avenue for myself. It was originally painted red, blue, and yellow, to lure tourists to the cemetery. Now it is simple gray. An Egyptian arch with obelisks on either side leads to a sunken avenue open to the sky. Family tombs, carved into the hillside, line the avenue. Each is set apart from the next by columns with lotus bud capitals. The valley was wonderfully cool in the humid June afternoon.

We followed the avenue to its end in the ring of catacombs called the Circle of Lebanon. The old cedar in the center survives from the original Ashurst estate, predating the cemetery by at least 150 years. Its spreading branches curtained our tour group 20 feet below the surface of the ground. FOHC is concerned for the tree because of its age and having had the ground around cut away beneath it.

We passed Radclyffe Hall’s tomb without remark from the guide. I happened to turn at the right moment to read, “And if God choose, I shall but love thee better after Death,” the epitaph chosen by Hall’s surviving girlfriend. Una Troubridge had hoped to be buried beside the love of her life, but died in Rome and was never returned home. I snapped a quick murky photo as the tour group moved on without me.

The tour climbed up to the mausoleum of Julius Beer. It is the “largest and grandest of all the privately owned buildings in the Cemetery,” according to the FOHC guidebook. Its design was inspired by the tomb of King Mausolus (from whom we draw the word mausoleum) at Halicarnassus, Turkey — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Beer’s mausoleum has a stunning blue and gold mosaic ceiling. After it was broken into and its residents dragged out of their coffins, the mausoleum has been converted to a tool shed by the Friends of Highgate.

img_6143

The Beer family mausoleum, Highgate, June 2016. Photo by Loren Rhoads.

In the Victorian era, the Jewish Beer family migrated to London from Frankfurt. Julius Beer owned the London Observer, but society shunned him because of his religion. In order to be buried in Highgate, he converted to the Church of England in the 1880s. Previous to that, people came to Highgate on weekends to picnic on the land above the Circle of Lebanon. Beer’s revenge on society was to construct his mausoleum to obstruct their view. Rumor insinuated that he had killed his family. His wife died first, followed by their eight-year-old consumptive daughter. Inside the mausoleum, a marble angel stoops to kiss a life-sized child — whose face was modeled on the death mask of Beer’s little girl. Beer himself died of apoplexy in his early 40s. His son Frederick took over the Observer and slid into madness.

Although he spent 5000 pounds on his mausoleum and owned a major newspaper, Beer did not receive an obituary in the London Times. If ever anyone deserved to come back as a vampire, I nominate Julius Beer. Persecuted for his religion in life, hounded by ugly rumors after his death, he seems most justified to be the demonic figure in black which inhabited Highgate Cemetery.

7 Comments

Posted in Cemetery essay

Tagged , , , , , ,

Death’s Garden: The Original Catacomb

Posted on September 2, 2016 | 7 comments

St. Sebastian 300 dpi001On our last morning in Rome, Mason and I wandered around the Piazza Venezia, trying to find the Archaeobus that would take us out to the Appian Way. I was sick with a cold I’d picked up in the Vatican (go figure) and we’d had no time for breakfast. As we rushed down the stairs near Trajan’s column, I missed a step. When I painfully straightened my legs, I discovered I’d skinned both knees. Miraculously, the fall hadn’t torn my slacks. I limped to the bus stop and was swept off on our adventure.

The ancient Christian catacombs hadn’t initially been on my “must-see in Rome” list. However, the more I read, the more it seemed I should overcome my skepticism. A lot of history had been buried in the old tunnels.

Beyond the third mile marker, the Archaeobus dropped us off near the Catacombe di San Sebastiano. A mob already loitered in the plaza. Mason and I hurried into the cloister on the right side of the small yellow basilica to be near the entrance when the catacomb reopened after lunch.

Sebastian ticket 300 dpi001

Entry ticket for St. Sebastian’s catacombs

We bought our tickets at a window barred like an old train station. The lobby occupied a long low room full of fragments of marble and terracotta, many clamped tightly to the brown walls. Each item had a relief on it: a bird, a fish, a lamb — symbols of Christianity to people who couldn’t read.

These shards of ransacked tombs saddened me. The bodies have been removed from their rest, whether portioned out by the Church or otherwise disrupted. For me, the grave is not the person, but I feel that the spirit of the person enlivens the grave. A vacant tomb has lost something that a rock never owned. Whoever they were to those who loved them, these people have been swallowed by time.

A German-speaking guide summoned a small group of tourists to follow him down the steps, leaving Mason and me in the chilly gallery of shattered tombs. A busload of chattering American tourists filed in behind us. Mason wondered if we should follow the Germans, even without understanding the guide, just so we’d be able to see everything below our feet without the mob.

An English-speaking guide appeared. A cheerful Turkish woman, Maria spoke with a mélange of British and Middle Eastern inflections. She glowed with inspiration. She had clearly been “called” to talk about the catacombs, her faith strengthened by the history of the martyrs below our feet. I was relieved that she felt no need to testify. Instead, she assumed we were all Christians, that we began with the same point of view.

Maria led us partially down the steps so that she could count the group. Thirty-seven of us would muddle through the tunnels together. Some were frail old people: ladies as fragile as birds, an elderly gentleman who leaned heavily on his middle-aged daughter. At the risk of gross generalization, many of the others appeared to be teachers on spring break. Other than a knot of African American women in bright flowered dresses, ninety-five percent of the group was white. Mason and I embodied the low edge of the age curve.

Our guide promised that there would be no ghosts in the tunnels. There were no longer any bodies, either. Most had been removed in the fourth and fifth centuries, when the catacombs suffered at the mercy of barbarian hordes who couldn’t breach the walls of Rome.

Maria ran through some figures for us: thousands of graves in four levels comprised the seven miles of Saint Sebastian’s catacombs. The tour passed through only a fraction of the second level. The other levels were unlocked only to archaeologists blessed by the Pontificia Commissione di Archaeologia Sacra, a bureau of the Vatican.

Sebastian interior001The steps reached a landing, then turned to continue downward. We had to take care not to jostle each other on the stairs. I had visions of some lady breaking her hip. Before long, the group reached a level and surged forward. The air, already cold and still, lost another couple of degrees.

Yellow globes, hung at intervals near the tunnel’s ceiling, did little to brighten the gloom. Other tunnels, also lighted, branched off at right angles. They tempted me, but I dreaded getting lost.

Our guide directed our attention overhead with the beam of her flashlight. A pickaxe had scarred the ceiling. “They excavated the catacomb by hand,” Maria explained. “The ground here is called tufa, a lava rock that is easy to dig. Fossores, special miners in service to the early church, planned the excavations and did the digging. They carried the earth away in baskets.”

She turned our attention to the walls of the tunnel. It looked as if bunks had been carved into the stone, irregular indentations that appeared comfy enough to crawl into. The bed of each cubbyhole lay reasonably flat. The shallow niches spanned just large enough to tuck a body inside.

Maria said, “The dead would be wound in a sheet and placed here, without a coffin, then a slab of marble — if they were wealthy — or terracotta would seal them inside. You may wonder how they reached the graves at the top.” She swept her flashlight beam upward. “They filled the graves on top first, then dug the floor down below them.” In the tunnel where we stood, the floor had been lowered five times.

She gestured to another hole. Carved between columns of larger holes, this one spanned only as long as my arm and barely deep enough for a bed pillow. “You’ll see a lot of graves for children,” she warned. “Infant mortality was high.”

Maria set off at a pretty good pace into the maze of tunnels. We used Mason’s flashlight to peer into graves as we passed. Each featureless hole had been stripped of mementos.

We walked by low arched compartments that began level with the tunnel floor and reached hip-high. Eventually we passed one with its sarcophagus still in place. Did you know that the word sarcophagus means flesh-eating stone? The original Greek sarcophagi were so named because the kind of limestone used speeded up dissolution of the corpse within.

That’s the sort of thing I knew going into the tour. I’m sure we could have had more lecture if there hadn’t been approximately forty of us in the group. Few areas were large enough that such a large group could coalesce. The guide spoke only when all of us could hear, which I don’t dispute, but I’m sure we passed treasures she never mentioned.

In some places, the tunnel expanded into small rooms with low, vaulted ceilings. The configuration made me think of a snake who’d swallowed an egg. Those rooms had once entombed families. We jammed into one, mostly dark as a cave. I huddled into the hollow where a shadowy altar stood, more concerned about cobwebs than ghosts. Then again, what would spiders eat so far underground?

I tried to conjure a sense of what the place must have been like when bodies filled it. There was, of course, no embalming in the Roman world of the second and third centuries. When people died, their survivors had to cart them out of Rome, since the Law of the Twelve Tables forbade burial inside the city walls. Most Romans would not have owned a horse or an ox, especially not Christians, who tended to come from the lower and slave classes. I suspect that transportation of a cadaver presented a pressing concern in the Roman summer.

So here we have a cool — though unrefrigerated — compound of seven miles of unembalmed corpses. I envisioned early Christians negotiating the tunnels by the flickering light of clay oil lamps, through air clouded with myrrh and the inescapable, cloying sweetness of rot.

The pagan majority of Romans disposed of their dead by cremation. They burned corpses on a pyre, then collected the ashes into an urn. These urns of ashes were placed in tombs that lined the Appian Way, the road to Ostia through the Porta San Paolo, and all the other old roads leading out of Rome.

Jews practiced inhumation — burial in earth — in observation of Genesis 3:19: “Earth you are and to Earth you shall return.” We hear it most commonly as “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” from the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer. Early Christians pursued this custom, burying their dead because Christ had been placed whole in his tomb. Like Christ, early Christians anticipated bodily resurrection.

So this was a vast maze of rotting bodies where the souls were believed to linger, awaiting resurrection. Some of these dead did not go gently to their graves but had been martyred, dying for their faith. How could there not be ghosts?

Romans called a collection of graves a necropolis: a city of the dead. Christians, many of whom spoke Greek rather than Latin, referred to their burial places as coemeteria, equivalent to dormitories. The root of dormitory means to sleep. Christians believed that their dead were merely resting (ideally in peace) until Christ came again and ushered them into heaven. This is why we refer to a graveyard as a cemetery.

Maria led us into a room unlike any we’d visited. Marble sheathed its floor. Its walls were whitewashed. In contrast to the rest of the catacomb, this room was brightly lit. It seemed spacious until the tour group spread out into it.

On my left stood a simple stone table, draped with a spotless white cloth edged in lace. Across from that, on a pedestal, balanced a polished marble bust of a man in pain or ecstasy. The bust was so wonderfully crafted that my fingertips tingled, wanting to touch that emotion.

st_sebastian

Prayer card for St. Sebastian

Maria said, “Sebastian was a Roman soldier who decided he could no longer persecute Christians. The other soldiers tied him to a tree and shot him with their arrows. They left him to die, but he recovered from his wounds and started to preach. They captured him a second time and killed him. Christians buried his body beneath this altar. This has always been known. This room has always been a place of worship. When Constantine converted to Christianity in 312, he had a church built above the catacombs and Saint Sebastian’s bones moved into the basilica, directly over our heads.”

A friend of mine (who hadn’t grown up Catholic) believed Sebastian to be the most homoerotic saint. Bound mostly naked to his tree, his soldier’s body straining against the ropes, mouth open in passion: Sebastian’s image has inspired artists for centuries. Bernini, the architect who decorated St. Peter’s Basilica, had carved the bust before us. I wondered that such a rare and valuable piece of art remained out where people might touch it.

The tour group flowed into a room with a low, arched ceiling. Glass encased its carefully lighted far wall. “This is another holy place,” Maria said reverently. “For a while, the Saints Peter and Paul were buried here.”

That seemed unlikely to me. St. Peter’s Basilica, at the heart of Vatican City, claims to have Peter’s body in its crypt. The legend is that Peter was crucified upside down by Nero and buried nearby in the pagan necropolis on Vatican Hill. I’m not clear why the early Christians would have moved his body to this catacomb so far from Rome, then moved it back (where they promptly lost it) until the excavations to build the current St. Peter’s in the sixteenth century. It’s not impossible, but it’s a lot of lugging for his bones to end up buried back where they began.

Paul also was supposed to have been brought from the site of his martyrdom and buried in this room, only to be transported back to the Via Ostiense where Emperor Constantine later built a basilica in his honor.

The evidence for these postmortem migrations? Graffiti. Scratched into the plaster were prayers in Greek, addressed to the Apostle and the Evangelist.

I had been willing to accept all else as history, if perhaps churchified history, but the temporary burials tweaked my skepticism. Our incandescent guide glowed with faith.

Sebastian tombs001

The Roman tombs

The tour made one final stop. At some point during the excavation of the catacomb in the late 1800s, church archaeologists had discovered three Roman-era tombs. These little villas had been perfectly preserved when the low area where they stood had been filled with rubble to support the church above.

I waited for the crowd to move ahead so I could peer into the Roman tombs. Beautiful delicate mosaics brightened the surprisingly roomy interiors. One tomb had a staircase that stretched down to the tunnels below it. I found it hard to conceive that the Christian architects had just thrown rubble down on these lovely tombs.

“Here is the origin of the word catacomb,” Maria said before we left the area. “This place was called cata cumbas, meaning the low place near the quarries. Here stood a crevice between the tufa hills where the Romans cremated their dead. Since it was already a necropolis, it made sense for the Christians to bury their dead here.”

From this place, the word catacomb spread to refer to any hall of Christian tombs, from the ossuary in the quarry under Paris to the aboveground mausoleum complex at Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, California.

I got all excited. Though I had been ill and injured, it was a thrill to visit a place that inspired so much of what I’ve studied. I suppose the feeling must echo what the Christian tourists felt as they completed their pilgrimages.

This essay was originally published in Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel.

***

Death's Garden001About the Death’s Garden project:

For the next year, I’m planning to put a cemetery essay up every Friday. If there is a cemetery that has touched your life, I would love to hear from you, particularly if there is one you visited on vacation. The submissions guidelines are here.

7 Comments

Posted in Cemetery essay, Church burial, Deaths Garden Revisited, Famous person grave, Wish You Were Here

Tagged , , , , , ,