Hallstatt Ossuary

An ossuary below St. Michael's Church in Hallstatt, Austria, holds over 1000 skulls, 610 of them delicately hand-painted. Due to limited space, after 15 years of burial in the churchyard, the burial sites were reopened, cleaned out, and given to new residents. The skulls and bones from the original buried bodies were moved to the lowest level of St. Michael’s Chapel, where they could be stored more efficiently. Due to this ritual, people began decorating their ancestors' skulls to make them less anonymous.