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Welcome
Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
What's New at Arcadia
Historic Burial Grounds of the New Hampshire Seacoast By Glenn A. Knoblock
Arcadia Publishing has releases a new title in the Images of America series, the historic account of the cemeteries along the New Hampshire Seacoast. This collection is a must for anyone interested in local history, genealogy, or colonial-era art. Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Historic Burial Grounds of the New Hampshire Seacoast and browse other cemetery books!
Green-Wood Cemetery By Alexandra Mosca
Arcadia Publishing announces the release of the historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery.
Announcements
Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb By Scott L. Newstok
An innovative study of the Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. A poetics of quotation uncovers the ways in which writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Holinshed, Sidney, Jonson, Donne, and Elizabeth I have recited these texts within new contexts. Visit Palgrave Macmillan and purchase your copy today!
Living by the Dead By Ellen Ashdown with illustrations by Mary Liz Moody.
A memoir about living beside a cemetery--and about the members of my family who came to rest at Roselawn Cemetery in Tallahassee, Florida. Please visit Kitsune Books for more information.
Graveyards of Chicago: The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski.
Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman
Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture is now available. Please visit Studio Indiana for more information.
West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark
Features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
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Boning up on Europe in catacombs and crypts |
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Saturday, 12 August 2006 |
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Rick Steves' Europe
I was just 19, in Romania for my first time. A new friend took me inside his home, to the hearth, and introduced me to what was left of his great-grandfather. It was a skull and, as was the tradition apparently there in the mountains of Transylvania, families remembered long-dead loved ones with this honored spot above the fireplace. I remember feeling a little bone envy.
Later, on that same trip, I was deep under the streets of Paris, all alone, surrounded by literally millions of human bones — tibiae, fibulae, pelvises, and skulls — stacked along miles of catacombs. I picked up a skull. As two centuries of dust tumbled off it, I looked at it, Hamlet-style. Just holding it was a thrill. I tried to get comfortable with it, in a way to get to know it. I struggled to stick it into my daybag. No one would ever know. The head dated back to Napoleonic times. What an incredible souvenir. But I just couldn't do it.
The next year, I went back to the same place, pumped up, determined to steal me a skull. It was a different scene. Skulls within easy reach of visitors were now wired together. And signs warned that bags would be checked at the exit.
Bones and more bones
While I eventually outgrew my desire to steal a skull, in later years, as a tour guide, I've noticed how intrigued many tourists (of any age) are with bones. If bones are on your list, Europe won't let you down.
Europe's ultimate display of bones is the Paris Catacombs, showing off the anonymous bones of 6 million permanent Parisians. In 1785, the Revolutionary Government of Paris decided to relieve congestion and improve sanitary conditions by emptying the city cemeteries (which traditionally surrounded churches) into an official ossuary. The perfect locale was its many miles of underground tunnels from limestone quarries. For decades, the priests of Paris led ceremonial processions of black-veiled, bone-laden carts into the quarries, where the bones were stacked into piles five feet high and as much as 80 feet deep behind neat walls of skull-studded tibiae. Each transfer was completed with the placement of a plaque indicating the church and district from which that stack of bones came and the date they arrived.
Visitors descend a long spiral staircase into this boned underworld. You start the one-mile subterranean walk by ignoring the sign that announces: "Halt, this is the empire of the dead." Along the way, plaques encourage visitors to reflect upon their destiny: "Happy is he who is forever faced with the hour of his death and prepares himself for the end every day." You emerge far from where you entered, with white limestone-covered toes, letting everyone know you've been underground gawking at bones.
Europe-wide crypts
If you know where to look, you can find fascinating bones throughout Europe. Cappuccin monks have a habit of hanging their dead brothers up to dry and then opening their skeleton-filled crypts to the public. Their mission: to remind you (mid-vacation) that in a relatively short period of time, you'll be in the same state — so give some thought to your mortality and how you might be spending eternity.
In the Cappuccin Crypt in Rome, the bones of 4,000 monks who died between 1528 and 1870 are lined up for the delight — or disgust — of the always-wide-eyed visitor. A plaque explains the monastic message: "We were what you are, you will become what we are now." Osteophiles make a pilgrimage to similarly macabre houses of bones at churches in Palermo (Sicily) and in Evora (Portugal).
Austria's tiny town of Hallstatt is bullied onto a thin strip of land between a swan-ruled lake and a steep mountain. Space is so limited in Hallstatt, bones get only 12 peaceful buried years in the church cemetery before making way for the newly dead. The result is a fascinating chapel of bones in the cemetery. Each skull is lovingly named, dated, and decorated, with the men getting ivy, and the women, roses. Hallstatt stopped this practice in the 1960s, about the same time the Catholic Church began permitting cremation.
In the Czech Republic, Kutna Hora's ossuary is decorated with the bones of 40,000 people; many of them plague victims. The monks who stacked these bones 400 years ago wanted viewers to remember that the earthly church is a community of the living and the dead. Later, bone-stackers were more into design than theology, creating, for instance, a chandelier made with every bone in the human body.
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?” Logan Pearsall Smith
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