It was raining on the day we visited Hallstatt, a perfectly grim day for a visit to what I expected to be a perfectly grim and even frightening sight in one of the most beautiful villages on earth. Hallstatt, in central Austria, is famous for its idyllic lakeside location, its 7,000 year history of human industry, and its untouched medieval atmosphere.* It is also home to a famous ossuary, or Bone House.
The rain kept us from swimming and enjoying the lakeside scenery as we had hoped to do, but it also kept the other tourists away. As we wandered the village under our umbrellas, we were almost the only people in sight, which made our visit to the Bone House, even more eerie. The dark weather and the dripping eaves provided the perfect atmosphere for one of the most macabre, and yet, most beautiful, sights I have ever seen.
The Bone House (also known as Beinhaus or Charnel House) sits adjacent to the small village graveyard, next to the Catholic church. It exists because the geographical location of the town, built on a tiny slice of land between the rugged mountains and the shores of the Hallstatter See lake, gives it barely enough room for buildings and a road, much less a cemetary. The graves in the town's tiny burial ground were routinely recycled: about fifteen years after burial, when space was short, graves were exhumed, the bones were collected and bleached in the sun until perfectly white, then moved to the Beinhaus.
But before the skulls were arranged in the bone house, each was beautifully painted with the name, sometimes the date, and often signs and symbols like crosses or crowns of flowers. The tradition of painting the skulls began in the early 1700's and the last skull was placed in the bone house in 1995.
I find it difficult to explain why I found this place to be so lovely. Usually when we die, all that's left for friends and family to remember us by are whatever earthly possessions we left behind, photographs, and some words engraved on a plaque in a cemetary or mortuary. Those in the Bone House exist beyond death in another way: at some point beyond death, they had one more chance to be remembered and to be lovingly cared for. Its not the collection of skulls that I found so moving, nor the sacred atmosphere; it is the gesture of love it took for each skull to be so uniquely decorated and placed among family members that struck me as a special gesture of remembrance, community, and heritage.
During those five weeks we spent traveling in Europe last summer, I largely gave myself a break from photography. Here, however, I had the forsight and optimism to take my camera into the rain and captured the only truly memorable photographs of the summer. It was rather dim inside the bone house, but with a high ISO (I used 2500) and my 50mm lens open wide at f/3.2, I was able to capture these shots using only light.
That night, we ate dinner in a 700 year old building, where beer has been brewed since 1496. In keeping with my top tips for traveling with a preschooler, we located the town playground (with a zip line, no less!) and there we spent the moments between storms. The weather finally cleared up, on the morning of our departure for Salzburg, and we rode the ferry to the train station across the lake in fine weather.
*And its UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Just before we embarked on our European vacation, the international press reported that China, without the village of Hallstatt's knowledge or consent, is building a replica of Hallstatt as a low-density, high-end residential waterfront development. Yes, indeed, China's reputation for copying now extends to entire towns.
