Charnel house
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Charnel House is a vault or building where corpses and/or bones are stored. They are often built near churches for depositing bones that are unearthed while digging graves. The term can also be used more generally as a description of a place filled with death and destruction.
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[edit] Old World
Often where suitable ground for burial was scarce, corpses would be allotted a certain time of interment following death. Practically, this enabled the relics to be collected and the ground re-used for further burial. This especially occurs in particularly rocky or arid places.
[edit] Monastery of the Transfiguration (Saint Catherine's), Mt. Sinai
A famous example of a charnel still in use, is that of Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, Egypt. Saint Catherine's, founded by Justinian in the early 6th c. on the site of a prior establishment by Helena of Constantinople in 313 or thereafter, lies at the foot of Gebel Musa where legend has it that Moses saw the Burning Bush. Sinai is an inhospitable place, and the brethren of St. Catherine's has, over the millennia, tamed land enough for subsistence. Relics are gathered in part for temporal reasons, the difficulty in establishing a large cemetery in the rocky ground; but also for spiritual reasons, reminding the monks of their impending death and their fate in the hereafter. The monastery comprises the whole Autonomous Church of Sinai, under the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The Archbishop of Saint Catherine's is usually also the Abbot, and after death is afforded the dignity of special niches within the "Skull-House".
[edit] New World
A Charnel House is also a structure commonly seen in some Native American societies of the Eastern United States. Major examples would be the Hopewell cultures and Mississippian cultures. These houses were used specifically for mortuary services and although they required many more resources to build and maintain than a crypt, they were widely used. They offered privacy and shelter as well as enough workspace for mortuary proceedings. These precedings included cremation (in the included crematorium) as well as defleshing of the body before the cremation. Once the houses had served their purpose they were burned to the ground only to be covered by earth creating a sort of burial mound.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Papaioannou,Dr. Evangelos-ed. S.Catherine's Monastery. The Monastery of St. Catherine (guidebook),local publication c.1996
