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I read somewhere that the catacombs were the result of needing cemetery land for building on.

What an effort that must have been! Convincing people that their ancestors could be extracted from the ground and stored as skeletons in caves underground. What a massive amount of land that must have freed up!

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Def not what really happened, since the arrangement down there more closely resembles macabre interior decorations than any reasonable funerary arrangements. The catacombs are the result of Paris being built on top of numerous underground tunnels that have existed at least since the Roman era but were massively expanded in medieval times.

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