Below the streets of Paris, day 0

The biggest hit of our four days in Paris was, perhaps surprisingly, twenty meters underground.  For our first afternoon in Paris, we chose to visit the Catacombs, an ossuary in the former limestone quarries under Paris.  It's quite something down there.

To enter the Catacombs museum, you descend 130 narrow spiral stone stairs, then walk in a dimly lit underground passage for 1.5 km until you enter the door which warns "Stop!  Here is the empire of death."

Opened around the time of the French revolution (late 18th century), the ossuary houses the remains of over six million Parisians.  Apparently when it first opened, the Catacombs was merely a bone "repository" and it wasn't until the early 19th century that the unorganized heaps of bones were piled neatly into impressively arranged walls of femurs and skulls (with the rest of the bones hidden behind these artful structures).

Flash photography was not allowed in the ossuary area itself, so we tried to best utilize the dim lighting which "illuminates" the bones. We were also not allowed to touch the bones, but we got quite close.

(For some of the grey-hued pictures below, I cheated a bit before posting them here and increased the contrast and exposure with iPhoto, otherwise they just look black.)

The skulls are of course the most impressive feature of these walls.  They seemed to be used artistically as borders or "trim"in the incredibly regular arrangement of femurs.

Most of the skeletons in here date from the revolution, or before, and there are a few tombstones and cemetery monuments included down here from that time.

Now, by the dim wall light, you can see the yellow cast of these centuries-old bones.

Our bags were checked as we left, sensibly enough.  I'm sure many people are tempted to try to take a souvenir.  I mostly just wanted to touch, but kept myself in check.  It's fascinatingly creepy.