TIMESHARE CEMETERIES

Source: Unknown (sent in by a reader)

March 15, 1999
Austria's tiny town of Hallstatt is built on a thin strip of land between a swan- ruled lake and a steep mountain. Space is so limited that the local church used to allow bones only 12 peaceful years buried in the cemetery before they were dug up to make way for the newly dead. Hallstatt stopped this practice in the 1960s, about the same time the Catholic Church began permitting cremation. But evidence of the tradition endures in the cemetery's fascinating chapel of bones. Each skull is lovingly named, dated and decorated, men's with ivy, women's with roses.

Cemetery space also was limited in Paris during the great land grab during the French Revolution. The cemeteries around medieval churches were deboned to open up land, leaving skeletons of countless Parisians carefully stacked along miles of tunnels beneath the city's Left Bank.

During some of my first visits to Europe, you could stroll the dank, dark privacy of your own stretch of an empty Parisian tunnel and play Hamlet and pick up a skull. I can still feel the skull I once held in my hand. Looking into its eye sockets, I pondered the ease with which I could pop that fellow right into my day bag and head home with the ultimate souvenir. I lost my nerve and returned the skull to its pile. The next year, having stored up enough nerve to actually go ahead and do the dirty deed, I returned to find the skulls wired together.

Macabre sorts or those otherwise fascinated by bones can dig up any number of obscure ossuaries. But regardless of whether you're looking, you're bound to stumble onto bones and relics throughout Europe. Whether in a church, chapel or underground tunnel, you might be surprised by who's looking at you, kid.