by Sarah Murray
Sam and I head back to the car. We want to find somewhere appropriate to scatter the rest of the ashes. We drive down a muddy lane toward the bluebell wood. Every year in this enchanted glade, for a brief but glorious couple of weeks, a blue mist rises around the base of the trees, an ethereal cloud of color that hovers mysteriously just above the ground. I have a photograph of Fa in this wood, his walking stick in hand, gazing ahead at this magical phenomenon. Sam thought we might scatter his ashes here. But sadly, the bluebells came early this year and we’ve missed the best of them so we head back up the hill.
On reaching a curve in the road next to a hillock, I have an idea. “I think this is where he took his ‘X marks the spot’ photograph,” I tell Sam. We get out of the car to have a look. From the hillock, you get a perfect view of the church and the surrounding landscape. Standing with the photograph in my hand and the vista ahead of me, it seems that this must have been the place from which he snapped the image of what was to be his resting place. It even feels like my feet are planted on the exact spot where he stood, camera in hand. In any case, he’s given us a certain license to improvise. “From my own point of view, however,” his document states, “if none of it happened, as set out, it would not matter!”
I run back to the car to get the Marks & Spencer bag. Standing on the hillock, Sam takes the scissors and snips the corner. I start swinging it to release its contents. Suddenly, the wind takes the ash and sprays it wildly in all directions. The gusts taking hold of Fa’s ashes are stronger than the “light winds” specified in his instructions. I can hear his “I told you so” voice as I try to control the direction of the flow—in vain. Some of his dust ends up in my shoes and across my legs. A fragment gets lodged in my right eye, causing it to stream with tears.
Sam is as usual ready to make the best of the situation. She says the wind is actually helping, since it distributes the contents of the bag, preventing it from falling into large mounds in one place. She’s probably right, as I’m sure Fa would have grudgingly conceded. And in fact there’s something spectacular about seeing the dust of my father become a swiftly flowing stream of gray-white smoke that’s disappearing into the clear, fresh Dorset air. This is where Fa belongs.
8
Dem Bones
A CHAPEL IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC
The toe bone connected to your—neck bone,
The neck bone connected to your—arm bone,
The arm bone connected to your—ankle bone …
Hang on a minute—what I’m looking at turns the lyrics of the old spiritual, “Dry Bones,” upside down and inside out. Here in a Bohemian chapel near the Czech town of Kutná Hora, someone has connected human bones to each other in ways that defy anatomical logic. In fact, this unlikely bone jigsaw seems to be challenging the whole relationship between human remains and the individuals to whom they once belonged.
Hanging from the chapel’s ceiling is one of the world’s most unusual chandeliers. Fringes of femurs dangle from its arms. Candles nestle in rosettes of pelvic girdles, their holders made from the most iconic of bony remains—skulls. Mandibles empty of their teeth join forces in unlikely chains. Sacra become finials topping the whole thing off. Strung between the chapel’s stone arches like grisly Christmas decorations are festoons of human remains, with arm bones as spacers and skulls as the beads punctuating the swags. Dancing embellishments turn the ghoulish into something oddly festive.
The theater of the macabre plays out in other decorations around the chapel’s dingy interior. In an arched wall recess is a huge chalice. Topped with a rim of skulls, its bowl is formed from femurs sprouting up from pelvic girdles, while its stem is a complex assemblage of patellae and vertebrae. More pelvic girdles splay out at its base. In another recess, a large monstrance features a sunburst made from what look like tibias interspersed with sacra. At its center, in the place normally reserved for the Host (the sacramental bread of the Catholic Eucharist), a single skull stares out at onlookers.
This is Sedlec Ossuary, a home for bones. And what a surreal storage facility it is. While most of the bones sit in four large pyramids, each in its own side chapel, others have prominent roles in the ornamentation. The chandelier alone is said to represent every bone in the human body while collectively the chapel decorations are thought to represent about forty thousand skeletons. Here in Sedlec (pronounced “said-lets”), the remains of countless individuals have been pieced together to create something extraordinary.
Lying about forty-five miles east of Prague, the Cistercian monastery at Sedlec was a major destination on medieval Europe’s map—a destination for the dead. The monastery became a rich and powerful religious center after the discovery of silver ore in the tenth century. By the thirteenth century, great ecclesiastical edifices were being erected nearby. Then something happened that was to raise Sedlec’s status to even greater heights.
During the Crusades, in 1278, the Bohemian king Otakar II sent Henry, abbot of the monastery, on a diplomatic mission to the Holy Land. Before setting out for home from Jerusalem, Abbot Henry scooped up a handful of earth from Calvary and put it in his satchel. Once back at Sedlec, he sprinkled it over the cemetery, turning the graveyard into a de facto outpost of the Holy Land.
Almost overnight, Sedlec became one of Europe’s most desirable burial grounds. Soon, people were sending the remains of their dead from all over Bohemia and Central Europe to be interred in the grounds made sacred by Abbot Henry’s handful of earth.
Plenty of bodies needed to be buried. This was the time of the Black Death. Thirty thousand victims of the 1318 plague were buried in the cemetery at Sedlec. After the Hussite revolutionary wars of the fifteenth century (among the first in Europe to make effective use of gunpowder), many more corpses arrived at its gates.
In 1511, with the cemetery filling up, a monk took on the task of unearthing bones from the graveyard to make way for new arrivals. He turned the bones into six twenty-foot-tall pyramids, where they remained until 1784. That was when the Schwarzenberg family bought the monastery and had the ossuary chapel remodeled. Seventy-six years later, in 1860, the family commissioned a woodcarver called František Rint to create something artistic from the millions of bones piled up in pyramids.
After bleaching and disinfecting the bones, Rint got to work. Dismantling two of the six pyramids, he had an ample supply of material to work with so he chose only the best, most uniform pieces for his masterwork, burying the rest in the cemetery outside. By 1870, with help from his wife and children, he’d finished his unusual commission. To honor his patrons, Rint re-created the Schwarzenberg coat of arms in bone. In it, a crow pecks at the eye of a skull (fashioned, of course, from a skull) with a plumed headdress—a reminder of the family’s victory over the Turks in the late sixteenth century. Using bone fragments, he dated his work and signed his name: “1870, František Rint” of “Ceska Skalice.”
This is all we know about the mysterious František Rint. Apart from the letters on the wall spelling out his name and hometown (a settlement on the Czech-Polish border), no records exist to give us further clues about his life. What we’re left with is his work—a resting place for the dead. And of all the resting places in which human beings have ended their days, Rint’s bleached bone installation must qualify as one of the most bizarre.
* * *
The relationship between a living person and the body they leave behind is puzzling. Just how much of an individual resides in a pile of bones? Exactly which bit—if any—of the human self is left behind after flesh and blood has dried up, rotted off, or been incinerated? What exactly are we after our heart has stopped beating—a person, or an object? “Organic matter,” would have been my father’s answer, at least at one time. For his request to have his ashes scattered in a churchyard near his Dorset home seems to indicate that ultimately he thought otherwise.
Fa’s ashes had arrived back from the Weymouth & Portland Borough Council crematorium in a cardboard box. Inside was a squat classica
l urn, made of what seemed to be toughened tin or steel, with a surface finished to mimic darkly polished brass. It was a plain enough object, although I’m sure it wouldn’t have been plain enough for him. As he’d written in his final instructions, “no brass casket to contain the ashes is needed; a cardboard box, or polythene bag will suffice.” Oh dear. Well, at least we got the cardboard box bit right.
During the months before we scattered the ashes, they (he?) sat on a wooden shelf in The Hut. On one side was the assortment of plastic models of jet planes I’d collected for him on my travels. On the other was an Egyptian brick, a roughly formed rectangular block of sand-colored clay with rows of tiny hieroglyphs imprinted on one side. His father, who’d been a military doctor, brought the brick back to England in the 1930s after a trip to the Middle East.
I’d spent a lot of time wondering about what exactly was inside that faux-brass urn. How much of my father was amid the gray-white granular particles held in the thick plastic sack that was the innards of the urn? I asked Sam whether she thought of the material stored in The Hut as Fa. “Yes, I suppose I do,” she said. “Well, it’s his bones. But I don’t think of his spirit as out there—it’s really just his bones.”
I wasn’t sure what I felt. My rational side (the one I acquired from Fa) told me he was gone. But I couldn’t help thinking that some element of my father was in there, keeping company with a few plastic airplanes and an ancient Egyptian brick.
In scientific terms, the urn contained mostly calcium phosphate. Our bones are made up of about 70 percent mineral matter and 30 percent organic matter. The mineral component is what gives bones the rigidity needed to hold up our fleshy bodies. The organic parts, which decompose after death, are like shock absorbers, giving the body the flexibility needed to sustain physical impacts. Most of the organic matter is formed by collagen, while small crystals make up the mineral portion.
But while bones may be mere minerals, we can’t seem to shake off the association between those minerals and the individuals of whom they were once part. Even the granules and dust that make up cremated remains, crushed beyond recognition, seem to retain their personalities. We keep them on the mantelpiece or in a box in the basement. We sometimes continue to include them in our lives, as one American woman I know does. Every year on her mother’s birthday, she takes her ashes down, places them at the center of the dining table, bakes a birthday cake, and invites the family to eat it sitting around the urn.
We even pay money to see the remains of the dead. Body Worlds, the show displaying real human bodies stripped of skin developed by German anatomist and physician Gunther von Hagens, has attracted more than thirty-one million visitors since it first opened in Tokyo in 1995, pulling in crowds in locations from Prague to Pittsburgh (and has people lining up to donate their own bodies to the project). The exhibit consists of plastinate bodies (whose fluids and fat are replaced with substances such as epoxy and silicon rubber) in a variety of lifelike poses. Von Hagens insists that the show helps visitors to understand how muscles, organs, and vascular systems interact to keep us alive. But my guess is that’s not the only reason the crowds are there.
Human remains are potent symbols, often used in religious rites. The early Mayan people carved human bones into ritual objects. Tibetans fashioned femurs into horns for use in exorcism rituals or ceremonies invoking good weather (their sound is supposed to scare off evil spirits while pleasing deities). Human bones have been used as drinking cups and daggers. Teeth have found their way into necklaces.
So while, scientifically speaking, bones are merely pieces of inorganic calcium phosphate, their significance extends far beyond their mineral composition. Whether it’s a femur trumpet, plastinate corpse, or a Bohemian chandelier, human remains can be much, much more.
* * *
On the night train to Prague, my accommodation is a high-tech version of the old-fashioned sleeper carriages. Doors shut with an antediluvian clunk but open with a plastic key card. Inside, a blue mock-granite washbasin is cleverly concealed in a small cupboard, the outer bulge sticking out, as if a miniature flying saucer has become lodged in its doors. I last traveled through the Czech Republic in the 1990s, when visiting some American friends living in Prague. Together we’d toured the countryside for a few days and one of our stop-off points was the Sedlec Ossuary, where I remember being astonished by the chapel decorations. I still have the tiny folded souvenir pack of photographs I bought there at the time. Ever since, I’ve been curious to revisit the place.
As the train enters the Czech Republic, my cell phone beeps. In today’s European Union, there are no midnight passport checks conducted by frontier guards boarding the train with flashlights and rough voices. Instead, a text message from the phone company telling you the service provider has changed is all that indicates a border crossing. Soon, the train is passing through towns with names I can’t pronounce—Prackovice, Litchovice, Lovosice. Medieval castles perched on rocky peaks rise above densely forested countryside. The romance intensifies on arriving in Kutná Hora itself, where splendid medieval squares and postcard-perfect cobbled streets sit in the shadow of spectacular Gothic cathedrals and medieval palaces.
The district surrounding Sedlec Ossuary benefits from none of this historic charm. Today, the ossuary is at the edge of a suburb dominated by public housing and approached via a nondescript road. I don’t remember these utilitarian surroundings from my last visit and I’m wondering if this is the right place. Then, seeing a line of tourist coaches parked outside a church, I know I’m on the right track. I enter the gates and follow a path through the graveyard to the chapel behind the main church.
After paying for my ticket, I head down the steps and into the lower section of the chapel, which houses the ossuary. There, the place is crowded with visitors chatting loudly and cooing at the bone decorations. “Just think, all these people died, and I bet they never thought for a minute they’d end up in this,” says a British woman gesturing with one hand and shaking her head disapprovingly. “What a cool place to be on Halloween!” exclaims an American man in blue shorts and a T-shirt.
Two big tour groups arrive—a party of schoolchildren and a cohort of student photographers equipped with tripods and long lenses. A high-pitched electronic alarm goes off as a photographer pokes his zoom through the bars toward one of the bone pyramids. The schoolchildren don’t seem at all disturbed by the dismembered skeletons. They’re too busy throwing coins up at the skulls, trying to get one lodged in an eye socket—death and its symbols reduced to a game of skill.
Soon, however, everyone files out. Children, photographers, cameras, and tripods all disappear. Like a railway station platform after the train has left, the chapel is empty and silent, marked by the absence of what went before.
Suddenly alone, I feel like an intruder—this, after all, is the domain of the dead, a club that has not granted me membership (at least, not yet). And now I’m alone, my imagination begins to work. I can hear a faint chorus of sound calling out from distant centuries. I’m reminded of a scene from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which Estragon and Vladimir, the two tramps, are discussing “all the dead voices,” how they whisper and rustle—or do they murmur?
Vladimir: What do they say?
Estragon: They talk about their lives.
Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.
Estragon: They have to talk about it.
Vladimir: To be dead is not enough for them.
Estragon: It is not sufficient.
[Silence.]
Children often imagine their toys coming out to play while they’re sleeping. Is that what happens to the bones in this chapel? Once the tourists have gone, do the dead turn up to inhabit their bleached remains, dance around before reassembling themselves into a garland or a candlestick, ready for the next tour group?
From empty sockets, the skulls stare blankly out at me. Who were these people? What did they eat? What did they wear? What were their hopes and fea
rs? What was it like to be alive when one in three people were dying around you? How did you carry on tilling the fields after you’d buried a wife and six children? The lives of these people seem so remote from mine. And yet, when flesh, fashion, mobility, and speech are gone, we’ll all look pretty much the same. Memento mori—“Remember you will die.” That, at least, is the message the bones here seem to give me; a scrap of intelligence from beyond.
* * *
In medieval Europe, it was common to dig up long-buried bones and store them in charnel houses and ossuaries to create space in the churchyard for fresh corpses. Bones ended up in great piles or, like those in the ossuary of Wamba in northern Spain’s Church of Santa Maria, Valladolid, were simply stacked up. Others were neatly arranged. At the English church of St. Leonard’s, Hythe, two thousand skulls and eight thousand thighbones are laid out on shelves as if awaiting some rush of morbid shoppers.
While these bone accumulations are the result of practical measures to prevent cemetery overcrowding, those responsible for them often decided to do something creative with their charges. In Rome’s Capuchin Crypt, the artist—possibly an eighteenth-century monk—arranged bones according to their shape, turning pelvic bones into rosettes, vertebrae into garlands. In the sixteenth-century Capela dos Ossos in Evora, a Portuguese town not far from Lisbon, the bones of an estimated five thousand individuals, thought to be soldiers and plague victims, are embedded decoratively in the chapel walls. The skeletal festoons of Sedlec are the most daring decorations of Europe’s ossuaries, but they’re not unique.
One of Europe’s biggest bone collections lies beneath the streets of Paris at Denfert-Rochereau. Known as the Empire of the Dead, these catacombs lie sixty-six feet below the Fourteenth Arrondissement (lower even than the Paris Metro and the city’s sewerage system). There, roughly six million bones and skulls are piled up against the walls of several miles of subterranean corridors.