![]() ![]() ![]() The subterranean chamber proved to be full of countless skeletal remains, presumably dating back to the first three centuries following Christianity’s emergence, when thousands were persecuted for practicing the still-outlawed religion. On May 31, 1578, local vineyard workers discovered that a hollow along Rome’s Via Salaria, a road traversing the boot of Italy, led to a catacomb. Though largely neglected by history, the skeletons, he found, had plenty to say. His pursuit of the bones soon turned into a book project, Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs, in which he documents the martyred bones’ journey from ancient Roman catacombs to hallowed altars to forgotten corners and back rooms. To create Saint Deodatus in Rheinau, Switzerland, nuns molded a wax face over the upper half of his skull and fashioned his mouth with a fabric wrap. “The strange enigma that these skeletons could have been anyone, but they were pulled out of the ground and raised to the heights of glory.” “That was part of this project’s appeal to me,” Koudounaris says. Who they were in life is impossible to know. Some of them still remain tucked away in certain churches, while others have been swept away by time, forever gone. The skeletons, he learned, were the “catacomb saints,” once-revered holy objects regarded by 16th- and 17th-century Catholics as local protectors and personifications of the glory of the afterlife. He began researching the enigmatic remains, even while working on Empire of Death. Koudounaris could not get the figures’ twinkling eyes and gold-adorned grins out of his mind. “It was then that I realized there’s something much broader and more spectacular going on,” he says. In another German church he visited some time later, hidden in a crypt corner, he found two more resplendent skeletons. He was struck by the silent figure’s dark beauty, but ultimately wrote it off as “some sort of one-off freakish thing, some local curiosity.”īut then it happened again. It was propped upright, decked out in robes befitting a king, and holding out a glass vial, which Koudounaris later learned would have been believed to contain the skeleton’s own blood. As he pried off the panels to get a better look, the thing watched him with big, red glass eyes wedged into its gaping sockets. He found the skeleton on a side aisle, peering out at him from behind some boards that had been nailed over its chamber. The church-more of a small chapel, really-was in ruins, but still contained pews and altars, all dilapidated from years of neglect under East German Communist rule. “But I followed his directions-half thinking this guy was crazy or lying-and sure enough, I found this jeweled skeleton in the woods.” “It sounded like something from the Brothers Grimm,” he recalls. He’d landed in this particular village near the Czech border to document a crypt full of skulls, but his interest was piqued by the dubious yet enticing promise of a bejeweled skeleton lurking behind the trees. Which is why, when a man in a German village approached him during a 2008 research trip and asked something along the lines of, “Are you interested in seeing a dilapidated old church in the forest with a skeleton standing there covered in jewels and holding a cup of blood in his left hand like he’s offering you a toast?” Koudounaris’ answer was, “Yes, of course.”Īt the time, Koudounaris was working on a book called The Empire of Death, traveling the world to photograph church ossuaries and the like. Though the Los Angeles-based art historian, author and photographer claims that his fascination with death is no greater than anyone else’s, he devotes his career to investigating and documenting phenomena such as church ossuaries, charnel houses and bone-adorned shrines. Paul Koudounaris is not a man who shies away from the macabre. ![]()
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