Yes, I do realize that the words featured in my title should not go together.
The question of the day is: Have you ever smelled eight hundred year old dead?
This weekend, eight of us traveled with Tom and his wife to St Michan's, a nearby church just across the liffey. The church was built on top of six 900 year old crypts, two of which are open to to the public. In the first crypt, we saw family "plots" piled high with coffins. Because the families could still be buried in these plots today, they are still considered sacred places and can neither be lit nor can the coffins be opened (and, of course, you can't take pictures).
However (there is ALWAYS a catch), over the 900 years that have passed, many of the sarcophagi located on the bottom of the piles have collapsed. This allowed the church to extract the mummified remains of the dead inside, and four of the least damaged corpses are now on display. Since the crypt is underground and built with limestone, the temperature stays constant, therefore preserving the bodies.
Also in the first crypt, there are two sarcophagi containing the bodies of two rebel brothers (a.ka. the Sheare Brothers) who tried to imitate the French Revolution here in Ireland to break from British rule, as well as the death mask of Wolfe Tone - who tried to do the same thing. The neat thing about these two rebels is that the church owns the original documentation from their execution note which was written after the brothers had been captured at a meeting of doomed rebel leaders who had a spy amongst their ranks.
The document is very legible, and visitors can clearly make out the death sentence for the rebels which went something like this:
*WARNING: The following is not suitable for children*
"...shall be hanged, not until they are dead, but rather, whilst they are still alive, they are to be eviscerated and, whilst still alive their insides are to be burned in front of their faces...."
They were hanged, eviscerated, had their entrails burned, and then their heads were chopped off and they were drawn and quartered before being thrown in their coffins....0.o wow
In the second crypt were the four mummies, three in the front and one in the back. The mummy in the back was the most special of the four as the way he was buried (with his thigh bones crossed) suggested he was a crusader, and the corpse dates back almost 800 years. Many people who read this may know that the burial symbol to mark you as a crusader would be to cross skeletons at their ankles. This is indeed the case, but because this man was so tall, his legs had been chopped off at the knees and placed underneath him. His broken pointer finger on his right hand was longer than my longest finger, and it had been broken off below the knuckle. The man had to have been at least six and a half feet tall - a giant in medieval times.
The big tourist attraction to St. Michan's is that you are allowed to touch the corpse of the dead Crusader - shaking the hand of a crusader was supposed to bring good luck, but today they suggest rubbing the crusaders finger to protect the skeleton from damage.
Did I do it? Yes
Did I wash my hands after? Heck yes!
Pictures were not allowed to be taken in the tombs, but they have been allowed in the past (or people snuck pictures) and you can view the crypts I entered here:
http://atlasobscura.com/places/st-michans-church-dt
Note: These are not my pictures and I have no rights to them.
These pictures show the crypt *exactly* how I saw it. Note: If you watch the videos available on the site, they're a little touristy, but the first man that speaks is the Caretaker - who acted as our tour guide. He was *absolutely* *incredible*. If you have time in Dublin, go to St. Michan's! It's only a E2.50 entrance fee, but I would easily pay three times that.
And lastly - a sense of Normalcy has returned to my life. For those of you who are writers you know (or perhaps, should know!) that November marks the beginning of NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month, a self-challenge that pushes writers to set aside time for their long-forgotten novels and write 50,000 words in a month. I participate in the competition every year, and going back to my writing has reconnected me with the idea of home. On saturday, I met up with a bunch of local Dubliners who are also participating and had an incredible chat with them about novel ideas, plots, characters, twists, and other such crazy writer stuff.
For those of you who like statistics, in order to accomplish 50,000 words in the month of November, a writer must write 1,667 words a day. However, since I'm traveling for 9 days at the end of the month and probably won't have time to write, I must accomplish a minimum of 2,380 a day. It's going to be crazy, hectic, and chaotic - but that's normal - hence a sense of normality returning to me! This weekend, I broke 20,000 words!
For anyone who wants to participate (jumping in 9 days late just means nine days less of procrastinating)
NaNoWriMo
And for those who asked, here's an excerpt from my new novel - The Awakened:
On December 21st, 2012, Earth was not destroyed. And the human race breathed a sigh of relief.
But it was never meant to end.
It was meant... to change.
It came as a trickle at first. For the fifteen percent of the population that survived the weight of that day, at 2:47 pm Greenwich time, the dam in their minds broke and with it came an incredible sense of relief and freedom. They felt revitalized, refreshed, renewed, and different. Like flowers in the winter, their minds had felt closed and dark, cut off from some unknown knowledge, but now a light shone through and they blossomed with unrefined talent.
They had become the Awakened.
^---Copyrighted 2009 - Heather Ryder
Cheers!
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