Little Petey's House of Holy Horrors

_{Cheery looking fellow, isn't he?}

So, I was going to the stuffed animal store that specializes in Wild Boars* the other day in order to pick up a gift for my niece for my imminent return home. On my way there, I wandered by the St Pierre le Jeune church. For the first time since I’ve lived here, the doors were open, so I wandered inside.


_{Mural of the Nations of Europe Marching Towards the Cross. FYI: "Germannia" on her steed was in the lead, poor old Lithuania straggling behind on foot.}

I’m sorry I didn’t discover this church earlier – parts of it date from the 4th century, most of the rest from 1250 or thereabouts.** Unlike either of the other major historically important churches in Strasbourg, this one has both a surviving cloister and many Medieval murals surviving inside. For a brief period in the 17th century, it was used by both Protestants and Catholic congregations, who were encouraged to mind their manners through the device of a temporary partition.


_{The cloister of the former chapter house. One day, when I have a back yard, I'm doing it up like this. Don't tell Amynah.}

Anyway, the highlight for me was the secret chamber (well, not so secret as hard to find) with the crypt, a chamber roughly 1500 years old. There’s a small recess in the wall that still contains some poor souls bones. I’m sure he didn’t expect, as he lay on his deathbed, that his mortal remains to be on display for the edification of ghouls like me several centuries later.


<sub>Ye Olde Bone Room. That's a vase in the head area of the body-shaped cavity in the floor, and an old stone coffin to the right.

* These people are very serious about their stuffed animals. I went in and asked for a Wild Boar, and the clerk, detecting my lack of facility in French asked (in French) “are you sure you don’t mean a Warthog?” and then producing fuzzy exemplars of both animals so that I could make my choice. They had a remarkable number of species represented with as much anatomical accuracy as the material and intended audience would allow. It was like being in pillowy zoo.

** As you might have surmised from the church's name, there is an even older St Peter's in Strasbourg than this.</sub>

Human remains

Because Mave was so kind as to indulge me and ask about the big pile of human remains I mentioned three posts ago (as an apparently ineffective means of trolling for comments), an explanation.

Kaysersberg is the pretty-little-Alsatian-village of choice for our tours when we have a car. It was the birthplace of Nobel Peace prize winner Albert Schweitzer, full of perfect little houses, has a castle accessible with a five minute walk and is only about an hour's drive from Strasbourg.

We've therefore been three or four times, meaning I've developed a tour of Kayserberg that is, proportionally speaking, nearly as in-depth as the one I have for Strasbourg.

As in Strasbourg, most of it centres on the church, which has a number of interesting features (including a wooden carving of the figure of Death when he was in short pants).


_{Awww, Baby Death! Didn't he have a Saturday morning cartoon?}

The larger part of the church-tour is in the back yard, where few tourists (bar the terminally morbid, such as myself) tend to roam. Here there is a monument and small graveyard to honour the volunteers from France's North African colonies that fought to liberate the country that had occupied theirs from its own occupiers - explaining why, were the glare from the sun not obscuring them, you'd see many of the visible gravestones are decorated with Arabic writing.



Beyond that is a little chapel. It's almost always closed, but the first time we visited, I noticed there were some stairs outside leading down to its cellar. It was locked, but it's possible to see through the windows. Within are an enormous pile of bones, dating from the 13th century. They were stored here, presumably because the small graveyard couldn't accomodate them all. Or, given that they're from the 13th century it's also possible that people were dying too fast in the plague to bury them all.

In any case, if you look closely, you'll can see that the bones are not stored, as you might expect, according to the individual from which they came, but rather by bone type i.e. all the skulls in one pile, all the femurs in another. I assume this is to facilitate easier stacking. (I thought I had a decent photo of this, but unfortunately it just looks like a pile of stryofoam. And anyway, who wants to see a big pile of skulls?)