Ramble On by Ken Herrera Since the Olympic Summer Games have now ended in Paris, France, let’s take a peek below the surface and see what is not at ground level.
The French had been mining limestone for decades. In 1774, a massive sinkhole in the Rue de l’Enfer (Road to Hell) engulfed houses, carts, and people, who fell 84 feet to their death. Multiple sinkholes over the next few years caused panic and outrage. In response, King Louis XVI created the Inspection Generale de Carrieres, or IGC in 1777 to map out and maintain quarries of limestone that was used for some of the city’s most iconic buildings such as The Louvre and Notre Dame. By the late 18th century, Paris had expanded and grown so greatly that much of it was built directly over the old mines therefore leading to unstable conditions. The Paris Catacombs started out as a solution to overcrowded cemeteries in the 18th century as most Parisians were buried in communal graves with the largest burial ground known as Holy Innocents’ Cemetery, which had been in continuous use for 500 years. In December of 1785, workers began exhuming bodies from Holy Innocents’ at night and carting them by torchlight to their new resting place: the city’s catacombs. It was a marriage of convenience with the vast underground mines offering a local and more sanitary storage solution. With the outbreak of the French Revolution on May 5, 1789, bodies began to pile up during the Reign of Terror and the newly deceased were being directly buried in the catacombs, gaining a new reputation as “The Empire of the Dead.” The catacombs are filled with the bones of over six million bodies being shaped into archways, tunnels, and walls. Take a tour of the macabre Paris catacombs if you ever get an opportunity to vacation in a city that offers many sights to take in. And don’t forget to #QUESTIONEVERYTHING |
KWMC
|
RSS Feed
