Capela dos Ossos, Évora, Portugal (1500s)
In Évora, Portugal’s oldest district, within the ringed road that used to be a city wall, lies the Capela dos Ossos decorated in a most unusual manner. The shocking chapel is covered with human bones. The skulls, femurs, and other bones are arranged artistically to create elaborate wall patterns. This is all the work of Franciscan monks tending the Évora chapel and cemetery in the 1500s. Évora was having a real estate crisis. The dead were using up too much space around the city. But instead of re-burying them, they put the bones on display, cemented into the wall. Two partially mummified bodies, an adult and a child, are on display. An estimated 5,000 bodies decorate the chapel’s interior. The monk’s hope was that visitors, upon seeing the bones, would reflect on their mortality. The eerie message above the door reads, “We bones that are here, await yours.”
