Monday, February 25, 2008

Bone Chapel, Church of the Capuchins


" The cemetery is beneath the church, but entirely above ground, and lighted by a row of iron-grated windows without glass. A corridor runs along beside these windows, and gives access to three or four vaulted recesses, or chapels, of considerable breadth and height, the floor of which consists of the consecrated earth of Jerusalem"(192)

"But, as the cemetery is small, and it is a precious privilege to sleep in holy ground, the brotherhood are immemorially accustomed, when one of their number dies, to take the longest buried skeleton out of the oldest grave, and lay the new slumberer there instead."(192)

"The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special interest of the cemetery. The arched and vaulted walls of the burial-recesses are supported by massive pillars and pilasters, made of thigh-bones and skulls..."(193)

"...the whole material of the structure appears to be of a similar kind; and the knobs and embossed ornaments of this strange architecture are represented by the joints of the spine, and, the more delicate tracery, by the smaller bones of the human frame."(193)

"On some of the skulls there are inscriptions, purporting that such a monk, who formerly made use of that particular head-piece, died on such a day and year; but vastly the greater number are piled up indistinguishably into the architectural design, like the many deaths that make up the one glory of a victory."(193)

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