The Features section contains online articles that I will be putting together for the website.
FEATURE: The Museo de Mumias of the Pomes Family: or, I Want My Mummy!
Most ten-year-old girls have toys to play with. Living in remote and arid Paredones, Peru, however, little Marisol Vasquez Pomes is not like other ten-year-old girls, and instead of Barbie dolls she has a shed full of horribly degraded pre-Columbian mummies. Some thirty-plus years ago, Marisol’s grandfather, Manuel Pomes, a local farmer of the region’s large-kerneled indigenous corn, or choclo, made a startling discovery one day while tilling his land: his field happened to sit on top of a huge, millennium-old necropolis. Finding long-lost burials is not all that unusual in Peru; given the long history of sophisticated cultures which have graced its lands for over 3000 years, burial sites may turn up almost anywhere. And while Paredones is nowadays about as far into the middle of nowhere as you can get—it is not even an actual city, but rather an administrative district of a couple thousand people sitting on desert plateau which is as dry as the Sahara—at one time it was part of the stomping grounds of the nearby Nazca Indians, one of South Americas most famous ancient cultures. The area later fell into the domain of the Incas, who built a palace complex here which gave the region its name, due to its finely carved stone paredones or, in Spanish, walls. There are several pre-Columbian cemeteries nearby, and at one, a long-since looted burial site near the Nazca settlement of Cahuachi, it is not uncommon to still spot human bones in the shifting desert sands. But if discovering the hidden burials is not particularly surprising, the extent of those under Pomes’s field was, comprising the remains hundreds of potentially hundreds of people; equally surprising was what Pomes decided to do with them.
Normally when ancient burials are found in Peru, especially if they are of appreciable size, either the government or the black market imposes its will, and usually it is a combination of both. But Manuel Pomes decided he wanted to keep both sets of hands off of the remains he had discovered—the black marketeers because, while they might promise him some quick cash, they would ultimately mistreat and spoil what he considered sacred remains, and the government because they would most likely haul them away from the ground in which they had been consecrated in order to let them languish in some storeroom. So he decided that he himself would build a museum to house them, right there on the land on which they had been buried. Lacking the funds for a proper building, he started out by gathering up as much cardboard as he could find, creating something like a skid row village for pre-Columbian remains, and then moved on to a thatched hut which would protect them from the weather. He then traveled the countryside and gathered up whatever other ancient bones he could find from tombs which had been sacked by robbers and added them to his collection. Finally, his entrepreneurial skills inspired him to place a sign which read Museo de Mumias (Museum of Mummies) in his dirt driveway, and he waited for hoards of visitor to flock to his property. They did not come.
A handful of visitors might trickle into Manuel Pomes’s museum now and again; mostly these were foreigners, since the locals found his admission charge of five soles (a little bit under two dollars) to be steep. But even the foreigners were never more than a few, considering the makeshift museum was in the middle of nowhere, and almost no one knew about it. Such was the state of affairs when Pomes died several years back. At that point the government finally stepped in. Technically, all these remains now belonged to the state as part of its national patrimony, but the local government likewise lacked the resources to deal with them, so since they were at least being “housed”—if you one can use such a term for a ramshackle hovel made of thatched reeds—they told the family that they were going to stay right there in their backyard, and the Pomes’s descendents were going to be responsible for their upkeep. This task has now largely fallen on little Marisol, since her mother is too busy to deal with it. A little girl with generations of dead Indians displayed in creaking shelves and cardboard boxes in her backyard.
To this day, the Pomes mummies remain almost completely unknown. Ask around among the tourist agencies in Nazca about mummies, and they will refer you first to Chauchilla Cemetery, a site of Nazca-era tombs run by a government agency; most locals will tell you the same. Probe further and some agencies will recommend the nearby Museo Didactico Antonini, which houses a few mummies in glass cases. Beyond that even the tour agencies will draw a blank and tell you there aren’t any others nearby. Only if you ask among cab drivers, find those who have been serving the area for many years and are familiar in particular with Paredones, will you find someone who can point you to the Pomes family’s mummy hut—which contains the remains of more people than Chauchilla Cemetery and the Museo Didactico Antonini combined. When visitors do miraculously appear, Marisol is stoic about her duties. She collects the five soles, shows them to the shed, and stands in the doorway bored, waiting for the guests to leave. Having grown up with these mummies, she is mystified as to why anyone would pay them any fuss or seem excited about them. “They are just mummies,” she says with an air of annoyance, “they are not going to do anything; I don’t know why some people want to stand there for so long.” Indeed, if the visitors insist on staying for too long, Marisol herself will just wander off and tell them to find her when they are done. Does she think there is anything special, or perhaps spiritual, about this place? “No,” she replies, seemingly confused by the question. Does anyone? “My grandmother did.” How so? “She claimed she could communicate with them.” Wow—in what way? What messages did they convey? “Who knows. My grandmother is dead.” Oh . . .well, how many visitors come here? “Maybe ten.” Over how long a period? “Every couple months I guess.” How do they know about it? “Who knows,” and she can no longer hide the look of exasperation over these questions; clearly it is closing time, and she motions towards the door. The Pomes mummies are, in fact, a first class collection of specimens that would rival those in many major museums, but they are just not enticing playmates for a ten-year-old girl.
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FEATURE: The Cele Kula: The Last of the Skull Towers
Duke Stevan Sindjelić sacrificed his life on May 19, 1809 battling for Serbian independence against the Ottoman Turks, and in the process attained the status of an almost mythic national hero. The three thousand troops under his command were attempting to hold the hill of Cegar in the city of Niš against vastly superior forces, and were worn to the point of exhaustion. According to the legends surrounding the battle, Sindjelić realized defeat was inevitable and set fire to a large ammunition dump, forfeiting his own life and those of his troops. Sindjelic’s act ensured that the Turkish victory was Pyrrhic—it cost the Turks more than they gained—and in an attempt to terrorize the local populace and break any further resistance the bodies of the Serbian soldiers were decapitated, and their heads sent to Istanbul as trophies. The Ottoman sultan, however, returned the heads to Niš, deciding they would be more effective built into a tower by a busy road to serve as a permanent and highly visible symbol of the futility of rebellion.
The resulting Skull Tower of Niš, or the Cele Kula as it properly called, was hardly a novel idea. In fact, it represented the last—and today the only surviving—example of what had been a long-standing Middle Eastern and Central Asian tradition. Monuments which commemorated military victories by displaying the remains (usually the heads) of vanquished enemies dated back at least the fourteenth century, and most frequently took the form of a tower or pyramid. The most infamous were constructed by Tamerlane, who erected them outside of both Baghdad and Isfahan; one was supposedly built out of 100,000 skulls. Such structures were considered the most effective means to simultaneously celebrate a victory and break any remaining morale among those who survived the defeat. The tradition spread as far east as India—one, built by Akbar, is known from Mughal miniatures.
Even before the Cele Kula, Europeans were familiar with this tradition, principally because of the Burj-er-Roos (Tower of Skulls) on the island of Jerbeh off the coast of Tunis. It was a conical masonry structure about 30 feet high, set all around with the heads of Spaniards who had been massacred by Saracens in the late sixteenth century. The exact history of the Burj-er-Roos is murky, but the story as it was most commonly told involved Spanish troops landing on the island en route from Malta to Tripoli, under a commander whose name is usually given as Juan de la Saera. The Spaniards made their way up from the beach and sacked the nearest town, raping and pillaging at will. The locals, meanwhile, bided their time for a counter attack—they waited until night, when the Spanish troops were drunk and the high tide had cut them off from their vessels on the beach, and slaughtered them to a man. The tower constructed by the victors was topped with the head of de la Saera himself, and reasonable estimates are that it contained the heads of perhaps 800 Spaniards. The Burj-er-roos was a popular site for travelers along the southern coast of Mediterranean Sea through the mid-nineteenth century, but it was finally dismantled in 1848 by Christian inhabitants of the island, who wished to bury the skulls in a Catholic cemetery.1
The Cele Kula is the last skull tower ever constructed; in fact, it was archaic even at its conception since the practice had long been out of style, but was intended to shock the Serbs with its anachronistic display of Old World barbarity. While it may have succeeded in that aim initially, in the end its value became something very different—it wound up being seen not as a mark of humiliation, but a symbol of bravery and heroic sacrifice, and when Niš was liberated in 1878 the decision was made to preserve it as a patriotic monument. The tower proved to be such a potent memorial that was sanctified in 1892 when a chapel was built around it. Still enclosed in the small domed chapel, the Cele Kula has become a curious nexus in the cultural life of Niš. For some it holds the status of a sacred relic, for others it is a bizarre curiosity; it attracts serious students of history, but also people with entirely different interests—including a local man who owns a white goose which he claims can commune with the souls of the dead soldiers whose skulls are present in the tower, and pass on messages to their descendants.
Those who visit the Cele Kula now are seeing it in a greatly deteriorated state. The Turks intended it as a warning to rebellious Serbs, not as a monument that would last for two centuries. Technically its construction its crude, and exposure to the elements during the nineteenth century caused the mortar to deteriorate to the point that large numbers of the skulls had come loose, or simply fallen to the ground. Many were taken by locals, either because they wanted to bury them or because they wanted them as mementos. From afar, the stories told during the nineteenth century of the Cele Kula conjured fantastic visions of a gigantic edifice stacked with crania, but this was a far cry from the reality of its condition. The tower was originally composed as a square with 14 rows of 17 skulls per side, for a total of 952, and it quickly fell into disrepair, even as its myth became increasingly glorified and its size and condition greatly exaggerated. A traveler in the 1830s published an account claiming there were 600 skulls on each side, which would be a total of 2400.2 That number was bettered considerably by the Frenchman Alphonse de la Martine, who also visited in the 1830s and published a memoir in the 1840s which declared “there might be from fifteen to twenty thousand” skulls present.3 Both accounts were trumped by an 1854 book which inexplicably described “a pyramid of 30,000 Christian skulls (Servians), victims of the Turkish sword.”4
Such outrageous accounts caused visitors to the site to be bitterly disappointed. A traveler in the 1830s expressed his disappointment, calling it a “petty affair,” and reporting that in reality there were only a few skulls still remaining.5 By mid-century it had fallen into such disrepair that it was being openly mocked by visitors. An Englishman reported that he found birds nesting in the holes where the skulls had once been, and that a “sparrow’s eggs were being hatched in the brainless peri-cranium of an ancient Serbian patriot.”6 The decrepit block currently holds some 60 skulls, but since more forthright reports indicate that some of these were returned during attempts to rehabilitate the structure, the reality is that visitors to Niš in the late 1800s arrived to find the tower almost completely denuded of skulls. Efforts to restore the Cele Kula began with the recognition of its patriotic value in the late nineteenth century. The decision to enclose it in the chapel was in part made to help protect what remained, and the tower is now enclosed behind a glass wall so that visitors are unable to touch it, and help ensure that this unique monument—the last of its kind—will be preserved for future generations.
Notes
1. See Thomas Kerrich, “Some Account of the Island of Jerbi, and the Tower of Human Heads, From Information Obtained on a Visit to that Island in the Summer of 1833,” in The Amulet: A Christian and Literary Remembrancer, Ed. Samuel Carter Hall (London: 1836), 9-37; Major Sir Grenville T. Temple, Excursions in the Meditterenean: Algiers and Tunis, vol. 1 (London: 1835), 156-157; Jamrs McCaulley, Wonderful Stories of Daring Enterprise, and Adventure (London: 1887), 100;; “Jerbeh’s Tower of Skulls: A Grim Monument to Saracen Vengeance,” New York Times, 6 Feb. 1881 p.10.; Robert Sears, ed., Sears’ Wonders of the World. Second Series (New York: 1856) , 63-64.
2. Richard Burgess, Greece and the Levant, or a Diary of a Summer’s Excursion in 1834, vol. 2 (London: 1835 revised), 272.
3. Alphonse de la Martine, A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land: Comprising Recollections, Sketches, and Reflections Made During a Tour in the East, vol. 2 (New York: 1842), 266-267. The account was originally written in 1832.
4. Ivan Golovin, The Nations of Russia and Turkey and their Destiny (London: 1854), 41.
5. Francis Herve, Esq., “A Residence in Greece and Turkey with Notes on the Journey Through Bulgaria, Servia, Hungary, and the Balkans, in Waldie’s Select Circulating Library, vol. 12 (Philadelpia: 1838), 169.
6. James Henry Skene, The Frontier Lands of the Christian and the Turk, Comprising Travels in the Region of the Lower Danube in the Years 1850 and 1851, vol. 2 (London: 1853), 401.
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FEATURE: The Doctor of Death: The Palermo Catacombs and the Immaculate Corpses of Alfredo Salafia.
The Palermo Catacombs—or, by their proper name, the crypts under the Capuchin monastery of Santa Maria della Pace in Palermo, Sicily—hold the most prodigious collection of mummies in Europe. Their origins date to 1599 when the first specimen, Brother Silvester of Gubbio, was placed in an underground vault, along with the scattered remains of monks brought from a previous friary. For roughly the next three centuries, brothers of the Order worked to preserve the bodies of fellow members, as well as various esteemed local personages, placing the prepared corpses in the ever-expanding subterranean passages. Mummification eventually became a kind of cottage industry and a means to support the monastery; in its eventual form, the site included lengthy sections for both ecclesiastics and lay persons, and areas reserved for professionals, women, children, and even virgins.
The term “mummification” here needs to be qualified, however—calling the bodies at Palermo mummies is somewhat generous, since many of them are little more than skeletons, held together by tiny bits of dried flesh and ligament. The means of preservation developed by the monks involved an application of arsenic to prevent the growth of bacteria, followed by dehydration. The corpses (which had been packed with straw) were placed on slats in a colatoio (“drying room”) underneath the monastery, to allow the tufaceous subsoil to naturally desiccate them to whatever extent was possible. The process took between eight months and a year, and the results were often dubious and sometimes horrific—that is, until Dr. Alfredo Salafia arrived and perfected a process of mummification that produced specimens which have never been rivaled.
Salafia was born into a military family in 1869, but little documentation of his early life exists. He trained as a medical doctor and eventually gained a post at the University of Palermo, where he began a series of experiments in embalming, working on unclaimed bodies from local morgues. Devising his own methods, he earned a favorable reputation due to the pristine state of his cadavers and was asked in 1902 to restore the remains of the deceased Italian prime minister Francesco Crespi. The body had been entrusted to a team of embalmers in Naples who had prepared and shipped it to Crespi’s native Sicily, but their work proved inadequate, resulting in adipocere—or what is sometimes called “grave wax,” a waxen build up of fatty acids in the face and internal organs of the body, which can take on a grayish or tan color. The disfigurement produced by the condition was not thought to be reversible, but Salafia worked for months on Crespi’s corpse and fully restored its appearance, using paraffin injections to reform the facial features, and meticulously reattaching strands of hair and beard which had fallen loose. The result was a public triumph—he gained his first great renown as pilgrimages were organized to view Crespi’s body. Salafia’s reputation grew further still when he was asked to handle another high profile corpse, that of Palermo’s archbishop, Cardinal Michelangelo Celesia, who died in 1904. His immaculate preservation of Celesia was considered a sensation; the body of the archbishop was displayed in the Palermo Catacombs for five years until it was finally moved to the cathedral, still looking so fresh that it was described as having the appearance of “a man who is asleep.”
Wealthy citizens of Palermo quickly flocked to Salafia to make arrangements for the preservation of their loved ones for display in the Catacombs. By the early twentieth century, preparation of corpses by the monks had stopped due to a local hygiene ordnance which had prohibited the use of the colotaio. But Salafia’s method not only provided a chance for the body to prepared for display, it produced flawless results the likes of which had never been seen. To the end of his life, Salafia kept his working methods secret, but it is known that he used a complex series of injections, including alcohol to dehydrate the body, formalin to kill bacteria, glycerin to prevent the body from becoming overly dry, salicylic acid to kill fungi, and zinc salts to give provide rigidity. He eventually marketed a prepared solution which he called “Salafia Perfection Fluid.” Sold in both Italy and the United States, he claimed that injections of this liquid alone could produce exquisite cadavers. Whatever methods he used, the bodies he prepared for the Palermo Catacombs between the turn of the century and his own death in 1933 are incorrupt to this day, showing no visible signs of deterioration. In contrast to the tawdry danse macabre around them, Salafia’s mummies are in perfect repose, with glistening skin and a life-like countenance. One, a former American legate, still has a perfect curl on his handlebar mustache.
Of the bodies Salafia preserved for the Catacombs, it is little Rosalia Lombardo who outstrips the fame of all the others. She has been called “Sleeping Beauty,” and “The World’s Most Beautiful Mummy,” among other appellations. Rosalia died on December 6, 1920, and was most likely prepared by Salafia during the end of that year or the beginning of the next. The girl, the daughter of a police general, succumbed to pneumonia at the age of two. Salafia had by this time been practicing his craft for at least two decades, and the girl, among the last mummies admitted into the Catacombs, represents the work of a master at the height of his powers. She has not been restored by a single hand since Salafia prepared her, yet her visage is still fresh, like that of that of girl in a light sleep. Her sandy-blond hair is tied playfully in a bow, and a slight smile alights on the visitor’s gaze—the interaction with this nearly century-old corpse seems casual, natural, and intimate. Rosalia, still so pristine and endearing, has gathered a small army of followers and devotees—she even has her own Facebook fan page. Salafia would understand and appreciate the devotion that his masterpiece inspired. For him, perfecting a method of preservation was an act of love, a means of showing care for the departed and ensuring the connection with the living endured. He motives are best explained by notations in his journals, such as this, one: “To hand down to posterity, the exact appearance of our dear ones just as they were when they left us at the moment of eternal departure, it is among these compassionate customs that antiquity has handed down to us and that time has preserved.”
For further reading, I recommend:
Dario Piombino-Mascali, Arthur C. Aufderheide, Melissa Johnson Williams, Albert R. Zink, “The Salafia Method Rediscovered,” Virchows Archiv 454 (3), 2009: 355-357.
Melissa Johnson Williams & Dario Piombino-Mascali, “Alfredo Salafia: Master Embalmer,” American Funeral Director, March 2009: 52-55.
Flaviano Farella OFM Cap., Cenni storici della chiesa e della catacombe di Cappuccini di Palermo (Palermo: 1982).
Paul Koudounaris, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses (London: 2011—forthcoming, fall).
You can also find death on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/empireofdeath