Sacred Bones

Cemeteries have always been final resting places for the deceased.

- Christine Graf

Or have they? For hundreds of years, cemetery plots in Austria were rented, and bones were removed from graves after bodies had fully decomposed. Cemetery space was limited, and there simply wasn’t enough room to bury generations of Austria’s dead.

Austrians were buried in Catholic Church cemeteries throughout the country. When faced with the problem of what to do with bones that were removed from their graves, churches began putting them in ossuaries — structures that store human bones. Austrians call them beinhauses (bone houses), karners, or charnels.

Beginning in the 12 th century, churches and monasteries throughout Austria used rooms, buildings, crypts, or subterranean chambers as ossuaries. Ossuaries were common throughout central Europe and South America and were used extensively by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. One of the world’s largest ossuaries can be found in Paris where the city’s underground catacombs house the skeletal remains of six million of the country’s dead. As was usually the case, the bones in the Paris catacombs were not just heaped into piles — they were artfully arranged. Bones were used to construct altars, walls, and even chandeliers in some of the world’s more elaborate ossuaries.