I see dead people

The French have a fascination with death and bones.  They had the bones on display at their tomb of the unknown soldiers of World War 1 and we were about to go see some more at the Catacombs.  I guess we must be fascinated as well as we were willing to pay money to see these bones.

The old buildings in Paris were built with limestone which was readily available beneath the city.  After the limestone was mined they would abandon the site and people forgot about these mines until huge sinkholes began appearing and swallowing up houses in the late 1700s.

Around the same time Paris was running out of space in their cemeteries.  There were also concerns about the health of the citizens who lived next to the cemeteries.  Cemeteries back then utilized mass graves for the burials of the regular citizens so the decomposition was really concentrated.  There was also an instance where the sidewall of a mass grave blew out and the contents spilled out into the basements next door.

So when the kings engineers were figuring out how to prop up the underground caverns to prevent additional sinkholes they also came up with the solution to fix the cemetery overcrowding by moving all the contents of the city's cemeteries into these caverns.

The catacombs were not part of our museum pass which is why we didn't visit till after our passes expired.  It's also difficult to visit as they let only 200 people into the catacombs at a time.  If you plan ahead you can prepay and reserve your tickets or you can just wait in line.

The first entry was 10am so we decided to arrive by 8:30 to try to be in the first group.  Waiting the 90 minutes would be better than the 2+ hours wait of the later entry times.  There was already a line when we arrived but the line quickly got longer by 9am.  I was the 70th person to enter.  I estimate we could have arrived at 8:45 and still been in the first group.

Once past the gate you went down a long spiral staircase.  After going up and down the Arc and Notre Dame I should have expected these narrow stairs again. Once at the bottom, you walked through various empty caverns with explanation on how the limestone was formed and mined and how the engineers stabilized the caverns.  It was wet and the floor was slippery. 

Soon you got to the areas where the dead bodies were placed.  Someone a long long time ago was creative in laying out the skeletons in a pretty formation.  Mostly the femur bone ends and skulls up front and the rest of the bones behind.  Only the skulls were cemented in front but the other bones were not glued down so you could reach at the top of the pile and grab a tibula or maybe a humerus.  Touching wasn't encouraged but I had to find out if the bones were loose.  After walking about a mile underground the tour was over.  Unfortunately the only way out was another set of spiral stairs!