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All Austria Hallstatt Hallstatt Charnel House

Hallstatt Charnel House

An Austrian house of bones filled with hundreds of intricately painted skulls.

Hallstatt, Austria

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Hallstatt Charnel House   H. KoPP
Hallstatt Charnel House   chagiajose
Hallstatt Charnel House   Mihnea Stanciu
Hallstatt Charnel House   Alfred Diem
Hallstatt Charnel House   infrogmation
Hallstatt Ossuary   Wolfgang Sauber
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Hallstatt Charnel House   kopp1963
Hallstatt Charnel House   chagiajose
Hallstatt   simonmatzinger
Hallstatt Charnel House   chagiajose
Hallstatt Charnel House   allynfolksjr
Hallstatt   lenzmoser
Souvenir from Hallstatt Charnel House   alexanderferdinand
Hallstatt Charnel House   jiuguangw
Hallstatt   jiuguangw
Hallstatt Charnel House   alfreddiem
Cemetery   TinaK / Atlas Obscura User
Hallstatt Charnel House   fallout
The Charnel House exterior   babblefu / Atlas Obscura User
  Archimedes / Atlas Obscura User
Outside the Charnel house, a stunning view on the lake   Archaos / Atlas Obscura User
Hallstatt   TinaK / Atlas Obscura User
Hallstatt skulls   TinaK / Atlas Obscura User
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About

The town of Hallstatt looks like the kind of Austrian town that the Sound of Music might have been set in. On a beautiful forested mountain, next to a perfectly blue lake, filled with charming 19th-century houses, the town is a perfect vision of cheer. Except of course, for the room filled with skulls.

Behind the Hallstatt Catholic Church, near the 12th-century St. Micheal's Chapel, in a small and lovingly cared for cemetery is the Hallstatt Beinhaus, also known as the Charnel House. A small building, it is tightly stacked with over 1,200 skulls. Because Hallstatt finds itself in such a lovely location, it also finds itself in very short supply of burial grounds.

In the 1700s, the church began digging up corpses to make way for the newly dead. The bodies, which had been buried for only 10 to 15 years, were then stacked inside the charnel house. Lest this all sound overly callous to the memory of the dead, there is actually a charm to the whole affair that Hallstatt can't seem to escape even with a room full of skulls.

Once the skeletons were exhumed and properly bleached in the sun, the family members would stack the bones next to their nearest kin. In 1720, a tradition began of painting the skulls with symbolic decorations, as well as dates of birth and death so that the dead would be remembered, even if they no longer had a grave. Of the 1,200 skulls, some 610 of them were lovingly decorated with an assortment of symbols — laurels for valor, roses for love, and so on. The ones from the 1700s are painted with thick dark garlands, while the newer ones, from the 1800s on, bear brighter floral styles.

Though this practice has been dying out since the 1960s, there is a much more recent skull in the Beinhaus. Beside the cross with a gold tooth is the skull of a woman who died in 1983. Her last request was to be put in the Beinhaus. Her skull was entered into the ossuary in 1995, the very last bone to be placed there.

Related Tags

Memento Mori Ossuaries Sacred Spaces Catacombs Skulls Catacombs And Crypts

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Community Contributors

Edited By

TravelTourist, Maria S Varela, rsopitz, Allison...

  • TravelTourist
  • Maria S Varela
  • rsopitz
  • Allison
  • TinaK
  • babblefu
  • swtraverler15
  • Archimedes
  • Archaos

Published

September 18, 2009

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  • http://www.hallstatt.net/publisher/articleview/action/view/frmArticleID/17/?lang=en-iso-8859-15
  • http://books.google.com/books?id=2V1QiUDSCREC&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=Hallstatt+charnel+house+steves&source=bl&ots=yw6Uz_fL4j&sig=a_bcgBzgX4-_Xrkt0XUJ4FT8LVI&hl=en&ei=1gu0Sr2YNYSD8Qa38LWpDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
  • p.126-129 http://www.thamesandhudson.com/The_Empire_of_Death/9780500251782
Hallstatt Charnel House
Chapel of St. Michael
Hallstatt, 4830
Austria
47.563662, 13.648716
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