In Paris’s Catacombs, Can a Restoration Breathe New Life Into City’s Dead?
📖 Full Retelling
For centuries, the bones of some six million people were buried in the catacombs beneath the city. Curators are trying to preserve and modernize the tunnels while maintaining the spooky ambience.
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In the 19th century, Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, a senior official who oversaw the quarries, turned the piles of bones into an underground museum. Under his watch, workers rearranged the remains into decorative walls and pillars of femurs, tibias and skulls — and the catacombs officially opened to visitors in 1809. Messages, chiseled into the stone, invited onlookers to reflect on their own mortality. “Where is death?” reads one. “Always ahead or behind, the moment it arrives, it is already gone.”
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