In the realm of the dead.

Only a few feet below the streets of Paris lies a mass grave. The bones of six million dead are stacked in the catacombs - once because of hunger and plague at the cemeteries of the place was short. Even today sometimes done strange things in the city.

 

Paris - The empire of death is almost thirty feet below the city. "Stay is," warns an inscription at the entrance to the ossuary, where the human remains of six million Parisians are aufgeschichtet. Bone to bone, very evenly. In the weak light down there and see the bones at first glance like a wall.

The charnel house under the 14 District is only a small part of the underground tunnels, which are far below the sewers under the electricity and gas lines and the subway shafts to a second Paris paste.

"All Paris is undermined," says Laure Urgine, which leads through the catacombs. "It's like a Swiss cheese." Since the Middle Ages there was the broken limestone, for the housing was used for the facades of Paris is so typical. Especially on three areas of several districts focused underground passages, which are several kilometers long and sometimes just as lost as the streets above.

Again and again plunged his houses and half the streets, as Urgine narrates. Therefore, the City of the quarries towards the end of the 18th Century and established a separate authority, which until today at the safety of the tunnel running.

People choked on the smell putrefaction

At that time, the ossuary at the Place Denfert-Rochereau created, hunger and disease because the people en masse dahinrafften and no more space for more deaths in the Paris cemetery was. Around the largest municipal cemetery, the cemetery of the innocents ", was the smell of putrefaction so bad that residents were faint and even stifled, it is told.

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[M] AP; blogs ONLINE

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Today will see the catacombs quite peacefully, they are among the most popular attractions of Paris. Hundreds of meters long, extend the underground passages in the south of the city, just so high that it can stand upright.

The longest bone is accurate aufgeschichtet, one on the other. All half-meter follows a series of skulls, arranged as a decorative band. Sometimes one sees on the man-sized bone wall. Behind it is the rest of the bones of millions of gravel, small bones, broken skulls, meters away is the right and left of the aisles to the rear inside.

Regarding the mysterious underworld is also a German raid shelters. "Resting", "smoking" and "backyard" is in the tunnels under the Sixth District, the German occupiers during the war to acquire the property. Elsewhere is a miniature replica of the port of Mahon, hewn into the stone: A soldier, on the Mediterranean island of Minorca against the English had fought, and after his return from captivity in the quarries worked, chiseled from the fortress Mahón from memory in the Stein.

Nowadays young people penetrate into the tunnels, to secret party to celebrate - or deep below the earth film. A few years ago highlighted the police under the old Cinematheque at the Palais Chaillot a regular cinema, with chairs, screen and sound system was equipped.

To make the hustle and bustle there is not degenerate, there are now even "Cataflics" - a separate unit of the Capital Police, which is similar to "Katabullen translate it. Incidentally, when the investigators returned the next day to prevent illegal cinema to admit, everything was gone: The operator had wind of it and get their material together with a trace of them made.