Ossuary of Pasubio

An ossuary is a container or room in which the bones of many deceased people are placed. Some ossuaries are chests, boxes, and even water wells. In the case of the latter, there are documented cases in which soldiers on the winning side of a battle have been ordered to “dispose of the bodies” of dead enemies, and those bodies were unceremoniously dumped into the nearest well of water. , turning the well into an ossuary. Search the web for that theme for the Battle of the South Mountain State War in Maryland and you will find ghost stories relating to dead Confederate soldiers who were thrown into a farmer’s well by Union soldiers after that battle.

In ancient European cities, the dead of many centuries ago occupy increasingly scarce space, so it has been the practice to tunnel under cities to create underground catacombs or cemeteries where ancient human bones are stacked in niches carved into the walls of seemingly endless underground roads. Europeans got this idea from the ancient Romans, who did so in Rome, their capital and a city that had been the seat of human habitation for millennia. Over time, even the cavernous catacombs became so filled with bones that it became impractical to keep people’s skeletons intact. So you will see niche after niche with stacks of thigh bones or other bones by type, and you might see skulls used as ghoulish decorations, anywhere in there.

The Pasubio ossuary is not so much like that. It is a place of honor and noble sacrifice, an ossuary that houses the skeletons of thousands of soldiers, but that is only a small fraction of the number of young soldiers who fell in the impossible mountainous terrain of the Dolomites, a mountain range in northeastern Italy. . The ossuary was built for the young fallen soldiers of Italy and for their enemy, the young soldiers of Austria-Hungary, who also fell there.

The battles in the high mountains took place during the First World War. This was between 1914 and 1918. My grandfather was an American boy, the son of a farmer who volunteered to fight for General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, who led the American Expeditionary Force to fight the Germans in France. For the Americans, that war was a trench warfare. But the theater America’s ally Italy fought in was in the Dolomites. Search the web for the June 2016 Smithsonian article “The Most Treacherous Battle of World War I” for details on the fighting in the Dolomites and the human side of the soldiers. As you will read, many soldiers return home from war seemingly whole, but their memories are forever trapped with the friends they lost and in the memory of the enemies they killed.

Many soldiers who return home cannot adapt, and although people try to help them, these soldiers must figure it out themselves. They relate better to other people who “have been there and done that.” Thus, it should not surprise us that some of them seek lonely places where they can converse with God, and the high mountains of the Dolomites have an ossuary where they can commune with the remains of other young soldiers of yesteryear, who have “been there and done that. “.

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