United States or Costa Rica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


It is a pity that all thinking persons who still object to the practice of cremation as unnecessary and impious could not be compelled to take up their residence for a while in the neighborhood of the two great cemeteries of Munich: they would not be long in crying out for the adoption of purifying flames and the innoxious columbarium.

This dove-cot, or columbarium, as the owner called it, was no small resource to a Scottish laird of that period, whose scanty rents were eked out by the contributions levied upon the farms by these light foragers, and the conscriptions exacted from the latter for the benefit of the table.

Around him, and in groups, according to their fancy, lying in their mantles, or with their backs against a sort of stone bench, which went all round the columbarium, were to be seen twenty brigands or more, each having his carbine within reach.

Then, as it was getting towards sunset and cool, we took our departure; the abbe, as we left the grounds, taking me aside to give me a glimpse of a Columbarium, which descends into the earth to about the depth to which an ordinary house might rise above it. These grounds, it is said, formed the country residence of the Emperor Galba, and he was buried here after his assassination.

And straightway he would return to the task of trying to realize the nature of her prayer and with what label she pigeoned him in the columbarium of her soul.

To secure more respect and decency there were many burial clubs, whether connected with the trade-guilds or not, and these procured a joint tomb of the kind known as a "dovecote," or columbarium, from the resemblance of its niches to so many pigeon-holes.

Ambitious of everlasting remembrance, as they were, the slumberers might just as well have gone quietly to rest, each in his pigeon-hole of a columbarium, or under his little green hillock in a graveyard, without a headstone to mark the spot. It is rather satisfactory than otherwise, to think that all these idle pains have turned out so utterly abortive.

A very narrow and steep staircase of stone, and evidently ancient, descended into this chamber; and, going down, we found the walls hollowed on all sides into little semicircular niches, of which, I believe, there were nine rows, one above another, and nine niches in each row. Thus they looked somewhat like the little entrances to a pigeon-house, and hence the name of Columbarium.

Another kind of tomb, of less magnificence, was the columbarium, which was nothing more than a subterranean chamber, the walls of which had a number of small apertures in them for receiving the cinerary urns containing the ashes of the bodies which had been cremated.

In this Columbarium, measuring about twenty feet square, I roughly estimate that there have been deposited together the remains of at least seven or eight hundred persons, reckoning two little heaps of bones and ashes in each pigeon-hole, nine pigeon-holes in each row, and nine rows on each side, besides those on the middle pier.