In Paris, there are scary sights.
The length of underground tunnels and caves under Paris 280 miles, in which lie the remains of nearly six million people, with the bones and skulls of men lay open on the concrete and the decking, and paved along the walls.
These places have different names – mounds, troparia, the underworld of Hell. Paris catacombs (Les Catacombes) appeared on the outskirts of Paris at a time when the construction of houses, palaces and temples took the stone, which was mined in these places, in consequence of which appeared the cave.
The extension of Paris led to the fact that part of the city was above the quarries and much of the residential blocks hanging over the precipice. The most dangerous places was “a suburb of St. Victor” (from the Eastern edge of Rue des Ecole South to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire), Rue Saint-Jacques, and finally the suburb (then a small town near the castle) Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Louis XVI issued a decree establishing the General Inspectorate of quarries, which still exists today. 200 years of hard work on reconstruction and strengthening of the dungeon was detained by the gradual destruction.
In the middle of the XVIII century caves, turned into the city necropolis, where millions of skeletons were brought from the cemetery of the Innocent. On 7,000 square meters of the cemetery were buried Innocent people from 19 churches from the XI century. Bubonic plague in 1418 year added about 50,000 dead, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew 1572 added thousands of victims. Thus more than two million bodies were buried at a depth of 10 meters, and sometimes the ground level has risen above two metres, since in the same grave could be up to 1500 remains different time period.
The cemetery was a huge huge source of infection, and emitting a stench which was said to sour milk and wine.
Although the priests opposed the burials of the cemeteries, after all, was the decision to ban burials within the city walls. 1780, brought torrential rains and the collapse of the wall of the cemetery of the Innocent, a tremendous amount of dirt and remains of dead bodies flooded into the basements of the houses. The cemetery was closed completely for 15 months, every night, special convoys were taken with it disinfected and treated bones, laying in the catacombs. Later thus cleared 17 300 cemeteries and other places of worship in Paris.
The reburial in the cave was conducted by the priests, praying for the souls of the dead. In the caves you can see the mountains in the tibia bone, because the bones and skulls piled separately. In the catacombs mandatory signs direction, because they can be easily lost.
Parisians jokingly called this whole underground system of “Deposits and soup sets”.
A few other facts:
In the catacombs with time was electricity.
– The Emperor Napoleon III loved to host important guests.
Today tourists visit the 2.5 km of specially equipped moves.
– The area of the catacombs more than 11,000 square meters.
Once the watchman of the Church of Val-de-grace Philibert Asper, in search of wine cellars, set out to explore every nook and cranny of the catacombs and got lost. His body, identified by the clothing and keys found only 11 years later.
Today the catacombs are at risk of blur due to groundwater. Since 1980, the water level began to rise, causing several of the galleries were flooded.
In the beginning of the Second world war, the quarry was equipped with a top-secret German bunker, and later, just 500 metres away, in 1944 there was the headquarters of the Resistance movement.
During the cold war in the underground galleries of Paris, was equipped with bomb shelters in case of nuclear war.
