An ossuary is a storage facility for bones and bodies, used for various reasons such as storing bones that have been unearthed or for religious purposes. They can be found near churches and monasteries and are not always gloomy, such as the Bone Church in Sedlec. Ossuaries are different from tombs or mausoleums and can include a mixture of bones from various people. Examples of poignant ossuaries include bone-filled houses in Rwanda that serve as memorial sites for the genocide in 1994.
An ossuary is a facility where bones and bodies are stored, both short-term and long-term. The term “charnel house” is also used to refer more generally to a place full of death, destruction and suffering; for example, a plague house might be called an “charnel house.” Working ossuaries are not uncommon in parts of the world, and numerous historic examples can be found near churches and monasteries. Ossuaries don’t have to be gloomy; the famous Bone Church in Sedlec in the Czech Republic, for example, is actually quite nice, according to some visitors.
The original function of an ossuary was probably purely pragmatic. In some cases, bodies had to be stored above ground before burial because the ground was too difficult to dig at certain times of the year or because gravediggers were not readily available. Bodies were also stored until they reached a state of putrefaction to ensure they were dead, in some cultures.
At the other end of the spectrum, ossuaries were used to store the bones that were being unearthed. Even the most well-organized cemetery can experience bone migration, and historically the bones that have been encountered during the excavation of graves have been stored in an ossuary. In this way, the remains could be respectfully preserved even if the original owner could not be identified. In some cultures, remains are actually deliberately unearthed for religious reasons, in which case they may be stored in individual ossuary boxes or niches in an ossuary.
In other cases, people use an ossuary to store older remains as they have limited space in which to bury people. In these cases, the bodies are buried until their spaces are needed, then they are respectfully disinterred and moved to an ossuary. One of the most famous ossuaries in the world is St. Catherine’s Monastery, a monastery surrounded by dry, rocky terrain that is difficult to excavate. Visitors to the monastery can tour the ossuary, which is filled with the bones of monks who served and died there.
An ossuary is not exactly the same thing as a tomb or a mausoleum, unless referring to a group grave. Ossuaries are usually set up to encourage direct contemplation of the bones, while many tombs and mausoleums are hermetically sealed to hide their occupants. An ossuary may also include a mixture of bones from a large assortment of people, rather than bones from related individuals, as is usually the case with a group grave. Some more poignant examples of ossuaries include several bone-filled houses in Rwanda that have been maintained by the government as memorial sites to remind people of the genocide that occurred there in 1994.
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