Bone temples: Christian ossuaries (ossuary)

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The interior can be made from any material. How do you, for example, an interior made of human bones? And not somewhere in the cannibal's cave, but in a Christian church.

Ossuarium (Latin ossuarium, from Latin os (genitive ossis) - "bone") is a box, urn, well, place or building for storing skeletonized remains. In Russian, there is a synonym for this word - kostnitsa.

Digging bones out of the ground and further demonstrating them in special rooms (ossuary, or kimithiria) is not a mockery and not a desecration of ancestors. This is the normal Christian asceticism of the Greek (Eastern) tradition.

On Athos, some time after the burial of the deceased, he was exhumed and the remains were reburied so as to have direct access to them. By the way, the owner's name was often written on the turtles. Interestingly, among the Greeks, an incorruptible body was considered a sign of an unrighteous life or unworthy behavior after death.

In addition to Athos, there are ossuary in the Kiev caves in Ukraine, in the Murom Spaso-Preobrazhensky monastery in Russia, in the Bulgarian Kavarna (1981!). There, parts of the skeletons are not a design element, but, so to speak, an interior feature. The largest ossuary in the world is located in the catacombs of Paris, where the remains of more than 6 million people are stored.

The most striking examples of precisely the design use of this specific material are the famous ossuary located three kilometers from the center of the Czech town of Kutná Hora in Sedlice, founded at the beginning of the 16th century and taking its modern form in 1870, and the chapel in the Portuguese city of Evora, dating from the 17th century.

Capela dos ossos

Capela dos Ossos (lit. "Chapel of the Bones") is one of the most famous monuments in Evora, Portugal. It is a small chapel located next to the entrance to the Church of St. Francis. The chapel got its name because its interior walls are covered and decorated with human skulls and bones.

Capela dos Ossos was built in the 16th century by a Franciscan monk who, in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation of that era, wanted to push his brothers to contemplation and convey to them the idea that earthly life is only a temporary phenomenon. This is clearly shown in the famous inscription at the entrance to the chapel: “Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos” (“We, the bones that are here, are waiting for you.”).

The gloomy chapel consists of three spans 18.7 meters long and 11 meters wide. Light enters through three small holes on the left. Its walls and eight pillars are decorated with carefully ordered "patterns" of bones and skulls held together with cement. The ceiling is made of white brick and painted with frescoes depicting death. The number of skeletons of monks is approximately 5000 - based on the cemeteries, which were located in several dozen churches nearby. Some of these skulls are now covered in graffiti. Two dried corpses, one of which is the corpse of a child, hang from the chains. On the roof of the chapel is the phrase “Melior est die mortis die nativitatis” (Better a day of death than a birthday).

Kostnice v Sedlci

Ossuary in Sedlec (Czech Kostnice v Sedlci, All Saints Cemetery Church with an ossuary) is a Gothic chapel in Sedlec, a suburb of the Czech town of Kutná Hora, decorated with human skulls and bones. About 40,000 human skeletons were used to decorate the chapel.

In 1278, Henry, abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora, was sent by the Czech king Otakar II to the Holy Land. He brought back some earth from Calvary and scattered it over the abbey's cemetery. News of this spread, and the cemetery became a popular burial site for Central Europeans. Many thousands of people wanted to be buried in this cemetery. Medieval wars and epidemics, in particular the Black Death epidemic in the middle of the 14th century and the Hussite wars at the beginning of the 15th century, replenished the cemetery, which as a result expanded greatly.

Around 1400, a Gothic cathedral with a tomb was built in the center of the cemetery. The tomb was supposed to serve as a storehouse of bones extracted from the graves, since there was not enough space in the cemetery. The vacant space could be used for new burials or for construction. According to legend, after 1511, the work of removing the skeletons from the graves and storing them in the tomb was carried out by a half-blind monk of the Cistercian order.

In 1703-1710. The cathedral was rebuilt: a new entrance was added to support the outward sloping wall, and the upper tier was rebuilt in the Baroque style.

In 1784, the emperor ordered the closure of the monastery. The chapel and monastery grounds were bought by the Schwarzenberg family.

In 1870, the Schwarzenbergs hired a woodcarver, František Rint, to tidy up a pile of folded bones. The results of his work speak for themselves. At the four corners of the cathedral are huge bell-shaped piles of bones. Hanging from the middle of the nave is a huge bone candelabrum containing at least one specimen of each of the human bones and decorated with garlands of skulls. Other works of art include the altar monstrosities on the sides of the altar, as well as the large Schwarzenberg family coat of arms and the signature of Master Rint, also made of bones.

Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini

The small Capuchin Church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini is located on Via Veneto in Rome, near the Barberini Palace and the Triton Fountain. Built according to the project of Antonio Cazoni in 1626-31. Decorated with canvases by Guido Reni (Michael the Archangel), Caravaggio (Saint Francis), Pietro da Cortona and Domenichino. The church has several chapels with the relics of Catholic saints.

After the construction of the church, the bones of the monks buried there were transferred from the old cemetery of the Capuchin order, located in the area of the Trevi fountain, and placed in the crypt of the church. Gradually, decorative decorations of all six rooms of the crypt were made from them. In total, the crypt contains the bones of four thousand monks who died in the period from 1528 to 1870. The fifth room of the crypt houses the skeleton of Princess Barberini, niece of Pope Sixtus V, who died in childhood. The Baroque design of the crypt served as a prototype for the Sedlec ossuary.

The Skull Cathedral of Otranto

This cathedral is located in Italy, in the city of Otranto. It contains the skulls of 800 Catholic martyrs who refused to convert to Islam after the capture of the city by the Turks in 1480 and were beheaded on the hill of Minerva.

Catacombs of paris

The Catacombs of Paris are a network of winding underground tunnels and artificial caves near Paris. The total length, according to various sources, is from 187 to 300 kilometers. Since the end of the 18th century, the catacombs have served as a resting place for the remains of almost six million people.

Most of the stone mines in Paris were located on the left bank of the Seine, but in the 10th century the population moved to the right bank, near the old city of the Merovingian period. At first, the stone was mined in an open way, but by the end of the 10th century, its reserves were not enough.

The first underground limestone mines were located under the territory of the modern Luxembourg Gardens, when Louis XI donated the land of the Wauvert castle for the cutting of limestone. New mines are starting to open further and further from the city center - these are the areas of the current Val-de-Grasse hospital, Rue Gobelin, Saint-Jacques, Vaugirard, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In 1259, the monks of the nearby monastery converted the caves into wine cellars and continued underground mining.

The expansion of the residential part of Paris during the Renaissance and later - under Louis XIV - led to the fact that by the 15th century the lands above the quarries were already within the city limits, and a significant part of the residential areas actually "hung" over the abyss.

In April 1777, King Louis XVI issued a decree establishing the General Inspection of Quarries, which still exists today. For more than 200 years, the employees of this inspectorate have carried out colossal work to create fortification structures that can delay or even completely prevent the gradual destruction of the dungeon. The problem of strengthening the dangerous sections of the underground network is solved in one way, which does not require significant funding - the entire underground space is filled with concrete. As a result of concreting, such historical monuments as gypsum quarries in the north of Paris disappeared. And yet, concreting is a temporary measure, because the underground waters of the Seine will sooner or later find a way out in other places.

According to the established Christian tradition, they tried to bury the dead on the ground adjacent to the church. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church strongly encouraged burials near churches, receiving considerable profits for the funeral services for the dead and for places in the cemetery. Therefore, Christian cemeteries were located in the center of settlements not only in Paris, but throughout Europe.

For example, in the 7,000 square meters of the cemetery of the Innocents, which has functioned since the 11th century, parishioners from 19 churches, as well as unidentified corpses, were buried. In 1418, the Black Death or the bubonic plague epidemic added about 50,000 more corpses. In 1572, the cemetery accommodated thousands of victims of St. Bartholomew's Night. Since by the middle of the 18th century the cemetery had become the burial place of two million bodies, the burial layer sometimes went 10 meters deep, the ground level rose by more than two meters. One grave at different levels could contain up to 1,500 remains of different periods. The cemetery became a breeding ground for infection, emitting a stench that was said to sour milk and wine. However, the priests opposed the closure of city cemeteries. But, despite the resistance of the representatives of the churches, in 1763 the Parliament of Paris issued a decree prohibiting burials inside the city walls.

In 1780, the wall separating the cemetery of the Innocents from the houses on the neighboring rue de la Lanjri collapsed. The basements of nearby houses were filled with the remains of the dead and a huge amount of dirt and sewage. The cemetery was closed completely and burying in Paris was forbidden. For 15 months, every night, convoys in black took out the bones, in order to then disinfect, process and put them in the abandoned quarries of Tomb-Isuar at a depth of 17.5 meters. Later it was decided to clean up 17 more cemeteries and 300 places of worship in the city.

Ossuary on Athos

Keeping bones in special rooms is a long tradition of burial on Mount Athos. This is how the Russian writer Boris Zaitsev, who visited Athos in the 1920s, describes a visit to such a place:

The tomb of the Andreevsky skete is a rather large room on the lower floor, light and deserted. A wardrobe with five human skulls in it. Each has a name, date, year. These are the abbots. Then, on the shelves, there are other skulls (about seven hundred) of ordinary monks, also with marks. And, finally, the most, it seemed to me, formidable: in regular piles, like running fathoms of dead wood, small bones (arms and legs) are stacked against the wall, almost to the ceiling. All this was done carefully, with the deep seriousness that is inherent in the cult of death. Here, it seemed, only a special old man "death-doctor" is missing here to compile catalogs, biographies, issue certificates. And literature is present. There is a corresponding work on the wall: "Remember every brother that we were like you, And you will be like us."

Boris Zaitsev notes in his book that in the Athos funeral tradition, in addition to saving space, a sacred meaning is invested in the storage of skeletonized remains - if the deceased was a monk of a righteous life, then in three years his body should decompose. If not, then the brethren again bury the remains and pray earnestly for the deceased.

Myrrh-streaming chapters in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra

Kiev-Pechersk Lavra (Ukrainian Kiev-Pechersk Lavra) is one of the first monasteries in Kievan Rus. Founded in 1051 under Yaroslav the Wise by the monk Anthony, a native of Lyubech. The co-founder of the Pechersk Monastery was one of the first students of Anthony - Theodosius. Prince Svyatoslav II Yaroslavich presented the monastery with a plateau above the caves, where beautiful stone temples, decorated with paintings, cells, fortress towers and other buildings later grew. The names of the chronicler Nestor (author of The Tale of Bygone Years) and the artist Alipy are associated with the monastery.

From 1592 to 1688 was the stavropegia of the Patriarch of Constantinople; in 1688 the monastery received the status of a lavra and became a "stavropegion of the royal and patriarchal of Moscow"; in 1786 the lavra was subordinated to the Kiev metropolitan, who became its holy archimandrite.

The imperishable relics of the saints of God rest in the Near and Far Caves of the Lavra; there are also burials of lay people in the Lavra (for example, the grave of Peter Arkadyevich Stolypin).

Currently, the Lower Lavra is under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), and the Upper Lavra is under the jurisdiction of the National Kiev-Pechersk Historical and Cultural Reserve.

The myrrh-streaming chapters are an ancient and revered shrine of the Lavra caves, about which the Pechersk Patericon narrates: faith comes and is anointed with that peace … These chapters, contrary to nature, exuding not a simple myrrh, but healing, show the holiness and grace working in the saints of God …”.

In Soviet times, when the monastery was closed, the holy chapters stopped streaming myrrh. Employees of the atheist museum accused the "worshipers" of falsifying this miracle. In 1988, when the monastery was opened, myrrh streaming resumed.

Archbishop Jonathan of Kherson and Tauride, who was at that time the governor of the Lavra, tells about this miracle: “A novice comes running to me from the caves. Cries: "Father Viceroy, I'm sorry, I didn't see it!" - "What's happened?" “Yes, here,” he explains, “I was cleaning in the cave with the heads and didn’t see how water got into one of the vessels!” With some instinct, I immediately guessed that it was not a matter of water. “Come on,” I say. I go into a cave, open a glass vessel. And from him in the face - an inexpressible bouquet of fragrance. I looked, and the head, no longer white, but of a dark brown color, seemed to float in crystal clear oil. Miro! I open two more vessels, already metal, and there is a fragrant liquid from the palm in each. I recognized the miro, although I had never seen it. My heart began to beat. God! You have shown us a sign of Your heavenly mercy! The relics came to life! Woke up! Mother of God! You are our Abbess. It is You who reveal Your covering of Your abode! He ordered to call the old monk who lived in the Lavra before the closure, the now deceased Archimandrite Igor (Voronkov). He sniffed. He looked at me. There are tears in my eyes. This, he says, is myrrh!"