Gothic Style- Handbag to die for

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Skull handbags!

 

The Perfect accessory. Goes with anything!

These beautiful dark bags are made by Griffin Leather. See more HERE

Exploded Skull

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A Beauchene Skull, also known as an exploded skull, is a disarticulated human skull that has been carefully reassembled on a stand with jointed, movable parts that allow for the opening and studying of the skull as a whole or each piece individually.

Claude Beauchene the mid-1800s French anatomist  developed this method to display the anatomy of the head. Beauchene would meticulously clean a skull, separate its bones, and mount them on a stand designed to exhibit them at once individually and in context.

The concept of the exploded skull was first introduced byLeonardo da Vinci, seen in his anatomical drawings.

Skull Stuff

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Thank You Gothic Tea Society friends for sending in these awesome skull pictures.

Awesome cake!

Skull Camera

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As Halloween fast approaches, we were inspired to bring you some of the most bizarre and dark eco products. Hands down, this pin hole skull camera crafted by sculpture artist Wayne Martin Belger is the spookiest we have ever seen. The piece, entitled Third Eye, is part of a small collection of eerie photography equipment made from metal, precious stones, and human remains.

The device works by briefly exposing film inside the skull. And just like other pin hole cameras, there are no lenses, battery powered flashes, or any ability to zoom in on a subject. Belger says he prefers this low-tech photo capturing method, because it’s the most “true representation of a segment of light and time – a pure reflection of what is at that moment.”

See the full article HERE

Silver Skull Pocket Watch

Fabulous!

Otranto Cathedral ~ Italy

Otranto (IPA: /ˈɔtranto/) is a town and commune in the province of Lecce (Apulia, Italy), in a fertile region once famous for its breed of horses.
t is located on the east coast of the Salento peninsula. The Strait of Otranto, to which the city gives its name, connects the Adriatic Sea with the Ionian Sea and Italy with Albania. The harbour is small and has little trade.

On July 28, 1480 an Ottoman fleet of between 70 and 200 ships arrived near the Neapolitan city of Otranto in the region Apulia. Possibly these troops came from the siege of Rhodes. On July 29 the garrison and the citizens retreated to the citadel, the Castle of Otranto. On 11 August this was taken by the invaders.According to Christian historiography a razzia was held to round up the male citizens. Archbishop Stefano Agricoli and others were killed in the cathedral. Bishop Stephen Pendinelli and the garrison commander, count Francesco Largo, were sawn in two alive. On August 12 800 citizens who refused to convert to Islam were taken to the Hill of the Minerva and beheaded. Some of the remains of the 800 martyrs are today stored in Otranto cathedral and in the church of Santa Caterina a Formiello in Naples. The cathedral is said to have been used as a stable after that.
This version has come under severe criticism. From Turkish side it is disputed that large scale executions took place; the bones to be found in the Cathedral of Otranto are actually those of fighters killed during the Turkish invasion. Italian researchers, on the other hand, conclude that some acts of terror were committed by the Turkish invaders to create panic among the Italians around Otranto.

There is no doubt, however, that some citizens were transported to Albania as slaves.
In August 70 ships of the fleet attacked Vieste. On September 12 the Monastero di San Nicholas di Casole, which accommodated one of the richer libraries of Europe, was destroyed. In October 1480 Lecce, Taranto and Brindisi were attacked.
Because of lack of food Gedik Ahmed Pasha returned with most of his troops to Albania, leaving a garrison of 800 infantry and 500 cavalry behind to defend Otranto. It was assumed he would return after the winter. More on the Cathedral HERE

Calavera

The word calavera, Spanish for "skull", can refer to a number of cultural phenomena associated with the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead.
calaveras de azúcar ("sugar skulls") are used to adorn altars and can be eaten.
calaveras are poems, written for the Day of the Dead but intended to humorously criticize the living.
calavera can refer to any artistic representations of skulls, such as the lithographs of José Guadalupe Posada.

Random Vintage

Deep Thoughts

Catacombs of Paris

The Catacombs of Paris or Catacombes de Paris are a famous underground ossuary in Paris, France. Organized in a renovated section of the city's vast network of subterranean tunnels and caverns towards the end of the 18th century, it became a tourist attraction on a small scale from the early 19th century and has been open to the public on a regular basis from 1867. The official name for the catacombs is l'Ossuaire Municipal.


This cemetery covers a portion of Paris' former mines near the Left Bank's Place Denfert-Rochereau, in a location that was just outside the city gates before Paris expanded in 1860. Although this cemetery covers only a small section of underground tunnels comprising "les carrières de Paris" ("the quarries of Paris"), Parisians today popularly refer to the entire network as "the catacombs".



Most of Paris's larger churches once had their own cemeteries, but city growth and generations of dead began to overwhelm them. From the late seventeenth century, Paris' largest Les Innocents cemetery (near the Les Halles district in the middle of the city) was saturated to a point where its neighbours were suffering from disease, due to contamination caused by improper burials, open mass graves, and earth charged with decomposing organic matter.


After almost a century of ineffective decrees condemning the cemetery, it was finally decided to create three new large-scale suburban cemeteries and to condemn all existing within the city limits; the remains of all condemned cemeteries would be moved discreetly to a renovated section of Paris's abandoned quarries. The use of the depleted quarries for the storage of bones, based on the idea of Police Lieutenant General Alexandre Lenoir, was established in 1786 by his successor, M. Thiroux de Crosne, under the direction of Charles Axel Guillaumot, Inspector General of Quarries.
Remains from the cemetery of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs were among the first to be moved. Bodies of the dead from the riots in the Place de Grève, the Hotel de Brienne, and Rue Meslee were put in the catacombs on 28 and 29 August 1788.



The catacomb walls are covered in graffiti dating from the eighteenth century onwards. Victor Hugo used his knowledge about the tunnel system in Les Misérables. In 1871, communards killed a group of monarchists in one chamber. During World War II, Parisian members of the French Resistance used the tunnel system. Also during this period, German soldiers established an underground bunker in the catacombs below Lycée Montaigne, a high school in the 6th arrondissement.

The underground tunnels and chambers have long posed safety problems for construction in Paris. Quarries sometimes cave in, occasionally resulting in a hole in the ground above and causing damage to buildings. To prevent this, the IGC, Inspection générale des Carrières (General Inspection of the Quarries), was established in 1777 by the government in order to monitor the current quarries and prohibit the digging of new quarries. The IGC did, however, dig observation tunnels in order to provide themselves with better access to the quarries so that they might better monitor, repair, and map the consolidated quarries.

The monitoring and consolidation work has continued to this day. Because of the number of quarries, subway, train, and sewer tunnels that have been dug underneath Paris, as well as the softness of the stone involved, extra caution is taken when new construction is attempted or new tunnels are dug. However, this did not prevent problems during the digging of Paris Métro Line 14.