Catacomb in general |
Catacomb is basically an underground cemetery underneath Paris. But what makes it interesting and different than other cemeteries is that you can actually see thousands and thousands of real human skeletons. Let pause and think about this for a second. These are REAL human skeletons while mostly in any haunted houses they only have plastic and silicon skeletons which is much less scary than the real ones.
The catacomb is started as a limestone mine in the middle a Paris in 12th-13th century which is the reason that Paris become such a big city. Once the mine is empty, it is often forgotten as a underground tunnels underneath the city of Paris. However, once Paris got really crowded and there was no room for building more usual cemetery anywhere in the city, they decided to renovate the mine and move some bones down to this tunnels. And also after the French Revolution, there were too many dead people around the city, so they needed to find new buried site for these new corpses. Finally, in late 18th century, some part of the cemetery became a tourist attraction and turned into a museum for the history of the city itself.
Although I started with the impression of how weird and strange this place is as a tourist attraction, I realize that the Catacomb of Paris helps us understand the history of the city of Paris as once a huge limestone center and then turn into one of the most crowded city in the world from the transforming of the mine to a cemetery due to the constraint of limited areas in the city.
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