Douaumont Ossuary
Ossuaire de Douaumont
Interesting facts
- On 22 September 1984 François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl stood hand in hand at the ossuary, an image that became a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation.
- In 2014 the name of a German soldier, Peter Freundl, was engraved on the vault for the first time, beside the names of French dead.
- The bones are sorted by origin: the cloister holds 46 pink granite tombs, each corresponding to a sector of the Verdun battlefield.
- Nearly 4,000 engraved names of missing soldiers cover the walls and vault of the cloister, each added at the request of families or veterans' groups.
- Before the permanent monument, a wooden hut served as a provisional ossuary on the battlefield from 1919.
- Bishop Ginisty spent years raising funds around the world for the building; Canada and the United States were among the donors.
- The first stones were laid in August 1920, and engineers worried about its stability drew up a stone-by-stone plan of the entire structure.
- Some see the building as the hilt of a sword driven into the ground up to its guard; others read the tower as an artillery shell.
- The great bell, weighing about 2,042 kg, was cast in Orléans in 1927 and was a gift of an American donor, Anne Thorburn Van Buren.
- In the chapel, a 1931 Pietà by Élie-Jean Vézien shows the Virgin holding Christ upright with arms outstretched, so that his body forms a cross.
Why it is worth it
On the battlefield outside Verdun, a long, low building of pale stone stretches along the hillside, crowned in its centre by a tall, rounded tower. The Douaumont Ossuary holds the bones of around 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers who died in the Battle of Verdun, fought over some 300 days from 21 February to 19 December 1916 at a cost of roughly 300,000 dead.
The idea came from Charles Ginisty, Bishop of Verdun, who wanted a resting place for the remains that were being found across the battlefield in the years after the war. The building was designed by the architects Léon Azéma, Max Edrei and Jacques Hardy and inaugurated on 7 August 1932 by President Albert Lebrun. Its central tower is 46 metres high and carries a rotating red and white "lantern of the dead"; inside hangs a great bronze bell, the Bourdon de la Victoire, which weighs more than two tonnes. From the top of the tower there is a panoramic view over the battlefield.
The interior is a cloister-like gallery 137 metres long, lit through stained glass windows by the painter George Desvallières. Along it open 42 alcoves. What makes the place unforgettable, and hard, is outside: at the foot of the building, small windows let visitors look directly into the vaults below, where the bones of unknown soldiers of both armies lie heaped together. Nothing else in the architecture is as eloquent.
In front of the ossuary spreads the national necropolis, opened in 1923, with 16,142 graves, the largest French military cemetery of the First World War. Since 2023 the ossuary has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing of funerary and memory sites of the Western Front.
Getting there
The ossuary stands on the Verdun battlefield in the commune of Douaumont-Vaux, near Fort Douaumont, about 6 km from Verdun in the Meuse department. The nearest airport is Metz-Nancy-Lorraine (ETZ), roughly 65 km away. The site is reached by road across the battlefield.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Douaumont Ossuary is a memorial containing the skeletal remains of soldiers who died on the battlefield during the Battle of Verdun in World War I. It is located in Douaumont-Vaux, France, within the Verdun battlefield, and immediately next to the Fleury-devant-Douaumont National Necropolis. It was built on the initiative of Charles Ginisty, Bishop of Verdun.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
49.20826, 5.42367per Wikidata