Macabre Magazine :: bloodlessness.com

This is a handpainted coffin for a miner with pics and shovels painted on the side.

In 1994 over 200 mummies were found in a closed off area of the Dominican church in Vác, Hungary. The conditions in the sealed crypt created a natural mummification of the bodies inside. The preservation was so good that even the clothing they were wearing was found intact as well as the items they were buried with and the artwork on the exterior of the coffins. Many of these artifacts are on display at the Memento Mori Museum in Vác.

What makes these mummies unique is not the preserved bodies, but the preserved handpainted artwork on the coffins themselves. Each coffin was hand painted with images that may have represented its occupant and no two coffins are identical.

 Everything from the rosaries to the handmade stockings on their feet were equally intact, offering a gold mine for ethnographers on the funerary customs and everyday life of 18th century Hungarian villages. There was something there for doctors as well; traces of ancient tuberculosis. An Australian surgeon, Dr. Mark Spigelman, has devoted the past 6 years to studying the bacteria found in one mummy in particular, and the information gleaned from this ancient DNA could provide information that will help fight tuberculosis.

From an article from curious expeditions…

A huge selection of the coffins are exhibited, many stacked on top of each other in the same formation they had been found in and had been in since the 1700s. Each coffin had been lovingly hand-painted with crucifixes, flowers, quotations, bible verses, angles, skull and crossbones, hourglasses, and Memento Mori inscriptions. No coffin is a repeat of another; the variety of color, decoration, motif and even language (some in German, some Hungarian, some Latin) is simply incredible. These coffins seem to be painted with an almost joyous hand, as a celebration of the life, not a mourning of the death. One coffin, belonging to a miner, is painted with bones, skulls and a miner’s pick and shovel. Each coffin had been personalized with great thought and care.

for modern bizarre coffins, click here to check out the image gallery