Exploring the Secrets of Ancient Alexandria
From Alexander the Great's inception to its modern form, the city has stayed a lighthouse of knowledge, variety, and beauty. Its ageless appeal stems from…
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Located in Prague’s Jewish Quarter, this remarkable necropolis has seen centuries of weathering since its founding in 1439. Surrounded by a maze of old tombstones and twisted trees, the mortal remains of almost 100,000 people found in the Old Jewish Cemetery each have a unique story etched in stone carried by the breeze.
As soon as you walk into this hallowed area, the odd scene before you becomes clear. With 12,000 gravestones arranged at different angles, the cemetery silently honors its unique funeral customs. Space’s limitations led to the piling of graves, so producing a vertical record of Jewish history spanning almost three and a half centuries.
Together with time, the relentless march of nature has produced a situation marked by a systematic disorder. Positioned precariously against one another, moss-covered stones have Hebrew inscriptions fading slowly, like whispers lost to the passage of time. As daylight decreases and shadows stretch, the cemetery becomes more surreal and reminds one of the most atmospheric horror movies. Still, this site has great emotional value since it provides a physical link to earlier generations that inspires respect rather than anxiety.
Travel south to Mexico, where an island close to the busy capital has an image so disturbing it might provide the background for the most terrifying Hollywood horror films. Welcome to Isla de las Muñecas, sometimes known as the Island of the Dolls, where the line separating whimsy from terror disappears.
Thousands of abandoned dolls, their dead eyes staring out from every imaginable perch, abound on this modest piece of ground in the Xochimilco canals. Under the weight of these plastic sentinels, tree branches creak; their once-cheerful faces now battered and hideous, giving the island a macabre festivity.
Driven by an unclear goal, Julian Santana Barrera started gathering cast-off dolls from Mexico City’s garbage in 1950, transforming the island into this haunting gallery. His objective is to calm the restless soul of a small child who had perished in the nearby seas. In a turn of events that seems almost too beautiful to be true, Barrera personally met a watery end close to the island in September 2001, so leaving behind his disturbing legacy.
You can’t get rid of the sense of being watched as you navigate the little paths of Isla de las Muñecas. With their glassy stares, the dolls—in many states of decay—seem to follow your every motion. This is a place where the darker sides of human nature collide with childhood purity to produce an environment that is simultaneously intriguing and quite disturbing.
Our journey leads us toward Portugal’s sun-drenched landscapes, where in the city of Évora, a most unusual chapel starkly reminds us of our death. A masterwork of macabre architecture challenging our ideas of life, death, and the sacred, the Capela dos Ossos, sometimes known as Chapel of Bones,
Within the greater Church of St. Francis, this little chapel developed from a situation akin to that which the Paris catacombs’ designers encountered. Évora was surrounded in the sixteenth century with forty-three cemeteries, all of which claimed priceless territory. The fix is? a centralized ossuary functioning as both a potent memento mori and a last resting place.
You find yourself facing walls and pillars covered in the mortal remains of some 5,000 people as soon as you cross the chapel threshold. A grim greeter to all who enter, skulls smile from alcoves, femurs create complex patterns, and a whole skeleton dangles from a chain. The result is simultaneously terrible and strangely beautiful, a monument to the artistic vision of the Franciscan monks who established this special place.
Echoed in the inscription above the entrance, “Nós ossos que aqui estamos, pelos vossos” (“We bones that are here, for yours we wait”). The chapel’s message is unambiguous. Rendered in the most visceral medium imaginable, this is a sobering reminder of the transience of life and the equality of all in death.
Our penultimate stop is the Czech Republic, to a small town called Lukova, where one of the most eerie art installations in recent memory finds expression on an abandoned church. Once abandoned since 1968 when part of St. George’s Church’s ceiling collapsed during a funeral, it now serves as a silent guardian to the past, its walls whispering the echoes of long-forgotten prayers.
Artist Jakub Hadrava helped the church go from a crumbling ruin to a site of pilgrimage for macabre aficionados. Hadrava populated the pews of the church with ghostly sculptures, so bridging the gap between the physical and the spectral and producing a congregation frozen in eternal dedication.
The terrible stillness strikes you as soon as you push open the large wooden doors and enter the nave. Under the white coverings and in different prayer stances, the white sculptures seem to flutter between shadow and substance in the low light coming in from the worn-through windows. You seem to have found a service attended by the souls of the long-dead, their forms hardly hanging to our planet.
Unquestionably fascinating, the effect is quite disturbing. Within the framework of a space once set aside for perpetual redemption, Hadrava’s works challenge us to face our own death and the impermanence of human institutions. Long after you’ve left the grounds of the church, this is a masterful mix of art, spirituality, and the uncanny that stays in the mind.
Our trip ends in the lush mountains of Luzon, Philippines, where an old burial custom questions our assumptions about the line separating the world of the living from the domain of the dead. The Echo Valley in the town of Sagada is evidence of a distinctive funerary custom that has enthralled and terrified visitors for millennia.
Here among the mist-covered cliffs, you will see a sight that seems to challenge both gravity and traditional ideas of burial: coffins hung high above the ground, fastened to the bare rock face. Born of the Igorot people’s conviction that the higher the deceased are positioned, the closer they will be to their ancestral spirits, this practice generates a scene of haunting beauty and obvious spiritual energy.
Standing at the base of these cliffs and straying your neck to see the hanging coffins, you can’t help but be both in awe and uncomfortable. A few of the coffins date back centuries; their wood has faded from environmental exposure. Others are more recent arrivals, evidence that this age-old custom still rules even in the modern era.
Suspending these coffins is itself a monument to will and respect for the dead. Family members must carry their loved ones across difficult mountain paths and then handle the unstable chore of fastening the coffin to the cliff face. Speaking to the ingrained beliefs of the Igorot people, it is a work of love and spiritual dedication.
The hanging coffins take on even more ethereal character as evening settles over Echo Valley. Deepening shadows and thickening mist produce an environment that is both quite lovely and definitely frightening. A monument to the ongoing relationship between the living and the dead in Sagada culture, the coffins, silhouetted against the fading light, seem to float in the air.
Though disturbing to outsiders, this custom reminds us of the several ways that societies all around honor their dead. It asks us to consider the many ways in which people try to close the temporal and eternal gaps, so challenging our assumptions about death and burial.
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