Walking Up the Tunnels of the Catacombs of the Abbey of Saint Peter in Salzburg
This has got to be one of the strangest titles I even came up with for this blog. However, this is 100% accurate. I was visiting one of the stranger but older sites in the city of Salzburg. The Abbey of Saint Peter in Salzburg has a cemetery which also has an even older burial site beside it. The site is carved out of a hillside when this place was still an early Christian settlement. I don’t know why they decided to carve out these catacombs instead of burying them in the ground. Maybe there wasn’t enough space even then, which led them to decide to bury their dead on the side of a hill.
View of the City of Salzburg from the Catacombs of the Abbey of Saint Peter in Salzburg
The tunnels are open to visitors but they can be a little dark and unnerving to visit. I was visiting alone and you can just imagine how it felt when I was there. Though this isn’t the first catacomb that I have ever visited, this is the one that is above ground. Though much of the place is inside the hill, once in a while there would holes dug out of the wall to let air and light in. This is still not enough to illuminate the catacombs but it provided me with a little bit of comfort knowing that the city is just beyond the walls. One can easily get disoriented here since it was dark. At least with these small “windows” you know that you are not in the underworld, not yet anyway.
[xmlgm {http://www.worldwanderings.net/kml/ChurchofSaintPeterSalzburg.kmz} zoom=19]