John Hemingway (RAF officer)(2025)· Irish RAF fighter pilot (1919–2025)✦
Lee Shau-kee(2025)· Hong Kong real estate billionaire (1928–2025)✦
Lance Reddick(2023)· American actor (1962–2023)✦
John Magufuli(2021)· President of Tanzania from 2015 to 2021✦Mike MacDonald (comedian)(2018)· Canadian actor & comedian (1954–2018)✦
Phan Văn Khải(2018)· Vietnamese politician (1933–2018)✦
Meir Dagan(2016)· Israeli general and Mossad director (1945–2016)✦Zoltán Kamondi(2016)· Hungarian film director (1960–2016)✦John Hemingway (RAF officer)(2025)· Irish RAF fighter pilot (1919–2025)✦Lee Shau-kee(2025)· Hong Kong real estate billionaire (1928–2025)✦Lance Reddick(2023)· American actor (1962–2023)✦John Magufuli(2021)· President of Tanzania from 2015 to 2021✦Mike MacDonald (comedian)(2018)· Canadian actor & comedian (1954–2018)✦Phan Văn Khải(2018)· Vietnamese politician (1933–2018)✦Meir Dagan(2016)· Israeli general and Mossad director (1945–2016)✦Zoltán Kamondi(2016)· Hungarian film director (1960–2016)✦John Hemingway (RAF officer)(2025)· Irish RAF fighter pilot (1919–2025)✦Lee Shau-kee(2025)· Hong Kong real estate billionaire (1928–2025)✦Lance Reddick(2023)· American actor (1962–2023)✦John Magufuli(2021)· President of Tanzania from 2015 to 2021✦Mike MacDonald (comedian)(2018)· Canadian actor & comedian (1954–2018)✦Phan Văn Khải(2018)· Vietnamese politician (1933–2018)✦Meir Dagan(2016)· Israeli general and Mossad director (1945–2016)✦Zoltán Kamondi(2016)· Hungarian film director (1960–2016)✦Deep-dive burial history, researched and told with curiosity
Beneath the City of Light lies one of the world's most extraordinary burial sites — a 200-mile labyrinth of tunnels stacked floor-to-ceiling with the bones of six million Parisians. The story of how they got there is stranger than the catacombs themselves.
In the 19th century, the fear of premature burial was so widespread that inventors filed hundreds of patents for 'safety coffins' — elaborate devices designed to let the accidentally buried signal for help. The real history is stranger and more poignant than the legend.
In Tibet and parts of Mongolia and China, the most common form of burial involves neither earth nor fire. The body is carried to a high mountain platform, ritually dismembered, and offered to the vultures. To practitioners, it is the most generous act a person can perform after death.
In the small Czech town of Kutná Hora, a 14th-century church has been decorated entirely with the bones of 40,000 people. Chandeliers of skulls. Garlands of femurs. A coat of arms made from human remains. It is one of the most extraordinary — and most visited — buildings in Europe.
For over a thousand years, a sect of Japanese Buddhist monks practiced one of history's most extreme forms of spiritual devotion — a 3,000-day ritual of self-mummification that blurred the line between life and death.
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