"You found my virgins!"
Posted on 08/04/2014 6:18:36 AM PDT by Red Badger
UPDATED: A woman in southern Sweden is furious after stumbling upon scores of skulls and human bones inside Ikea bags in a church. The man who dug up the bones, however, says it's not as bad as it looks.
The Kläckeberga church is using Ikea bags to store the remains of around 80 people who were once buried under the floorboards.
The macabre collection, which is almost overflowing from a set of large blue Ikea bags, was found by local woman Kicki Karlén.
"There were around 80 skeletons," she told The Local.
"And it made me very angry about how they were just sitting there. Some people at the parish told me the bones had been there since 2009."
The bags are covered by a tarpaulin and have been sitting there since parts of the church were dug up and rebuilt to allow wheelchair access.
"I was on the team called in to dig out the bones five years ago," archaeologist Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay told The Local.
"Our mission was to document and rebury the bones, which may be as much as 500 years old. But the reburial was delayed and I have no idea why. The plan was to rebury them as soon as possible, but that's up to the church. The county board said they couldn't leave church ground, and it became complicated."
He explained that the bones were likely reburied in a secondary deposition many years ago in what he called a "bone house". The collection is mostly skulls and longer bones, he added.
While Papmehl-Dufay denied storing the bones in the Ikea bags himself, he admitted that it sounded like an efficient storage technique.
"It's not standard practice, definitely not for archaeologists, but the Ikea bags aren't actually that bad. They'd be great for stopping the moulding process. But it can't be that good to have them in the basement for so long."
Karlén, meanwhile, took to her blog to lament the situation and to call for answers.
"How would you feel if it was your grandmother or grandfather?" she wrote.
Karlén, an erotic novelist, has since told The Local that she may write a book about the bones.
"You found my virgins!"
The man who dug up the bones, however, says it’s not as bad as it looks.
The Kläckeberga church is using Ikea bags to store the remains of around 80 people who were once buried under the floorboards.
It’s not as bad as it looks? Oh, they were just buried under the floor boards...
It sounds likea Tarintino movie!
Either that or this church invented the phrase ‘skeletons in the closet’.
No, “skeletons under the floorboards.”
The bones were dug up because the nanny state made the church put in a wheelchair ramp.
The bones were dug up because the nanny state made the church put in a wheelchair ramp.
That’s ok cause “dem bones gonna rise again.”
But now they’ve got to assemble them.
That ain’t no vaudeville tune!
Nosiree!!
I did. It’s a Lutheran church. Have at it.
Take off the blinders and then read it again.
You just can’t admit to your hypocrisy. Okay.
Surprise!!!
And no Swedish meatballs. :(
What hypocrisy is that, AB???
Where is your righteous indignance about the treatment of the corpses by these Protestants? Or are you only concerned when impoverished Catholic nuns are discovered with skeletons on the property? Not that I should have to explain it to you; but seeing as you think my initials are AB, I guess I do.
Ha ha! The seventh circle of Hell!
Dragging arguments across threads is against the rules. Don't you know that?
But since you seem so eager to play a gotcha game with me, why don't we compare situations with this OP to the Tuam scandal? This story is about an old church in Sweden that had to dig up bones buried underneath a church (a practice even Catholics do as it is considered "hallowed ground") in order to place a state mandated handicap ramp. Here's what the story said (you know, the one I suggested you read?):
"I was on the team called in to dig out the bones five years ago," archaeologist Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay told The Local.
"Our mission was to document and rebury the bones, which may be as much as 500 years old. But the reburial was delayed and I have no idea why. The plan was to rebury them as soon as possible, but that's up to the church. The county board said they couldn't leave church ground, and it became complicated."
He explained that the bones were likely reburied in a secondary deposition many years ago in what he called a "bone house". The collection is mostly skulls and longer bones, he added.
While Papmehl-Dufay denied storing the bones in the Ikea bags himself, he admitted that it sounded like an efficient storage technique.
"It's not standard practice, definitely not for archaeologists, but the Ikea bags aren't actually that bad. They'd be great for stopping the moulding process. But it can't be that good to have them in the basement for so long."
Did you get that? They were already documented as being buried there centuries before (they HAD burial records) and were probably the bodies of deceased members of the church there. It's only this "erotic novelist" that is upset about the whole thing and she hopes to get a book deal out of it!
The Catholic church has this kind of stuff in their brag book:
Thousands of skeletons were dug up from Roman catacombs in the 16th century and installed in towns around Germany, Austria and Switzerland on the orders of the Vatican. They were sent to Catholic churches and religious houses to replace the relics destroyed in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. Mistaken for the remains of early Christian martyrs, the morbid relics, known as the Catacomb Saints, became shrines reminding of the spiritual treasures of the afterlife. They were also symbols of the Catholic Church's newly found strength in previously Protestant areas. Each one was painstakingly decorated in thousands of pounds worth of gold, silver and gems by devoted followers before being displayed in church niches. Some took up to five years to decorate. They were renamed as saints, although none of them qualified for the title under the strict rules of the Catholic church which require saints to have been canonised.
Then there's the The Sedlec Ossuary also known as the "Church of Bones":
The Sedlec Ossuary (Czech: Kostnice v Sedlci) is a small Roman Catholic chapel, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints (Czech: HÅ™bitovnà kostel Všech Svatých) in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have in many cases been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel. The ossuary is among the most visited tourist attractions of the Czech Republic, attracting over 200,000 visitors yearly.[1] Four enormous bell-shaped mounds occupy the corners of the chapel. An enormous chandelier of bones, which contains at least one of every bone in the human body, hangs from the center of the nave with garlands of skulls draping the vault. Other works include piers and monstrances flanking the altar, a large Schwarzenberg coat of arms, and the signature of Rint, also executed in bone, on the wall near the entrance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary
You expect me to be righteously indignant about the bones in Sweden since I voiced disapproval of nearly 800 bodies of babies and children buried in and around an old concrete septic tank on the grounds of an old Catholic orphanage and workhouse that HAD no documented burial records and happened less than a hundred years ago? Sorry, they are NOT comparable. It sounds to me like "those" Protestants acted much more respectfully towards their dead than the "impoverished" nuns - though, NOT an impoverished Roman Catholic church which sponsored the nuns, let's not forget.
Guess you'll have to keep digging.
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