On the outside wall of Saint Nicolai Church in Vejle, Denmark, 23 human skulls are embedded in spherical, recessed niches. Set a number of toes above the bottom, they're hidden in plain sight and simple to overlook from the road until to look. Sunken into the church's brickwork and darkened with age, the skulls lend the constructing a quietly eerie environment.
There are just a few completely different tales about the place the skulls got here from. One says they belonged to 23 bandits who used to ambush retailers within the forest simply outdoors city. Once they have been lastly caught and beheaded, their skulls have been constructed into the church wall, perhaps as a stark reminder to others to not trigger bother.
One other model hyperlinks the skulls to Polish mercenaries who died through the Thirty Years' Struggle, a battle that swept by way of this a part of Europe within the 1600s. Placing their stays on show might need been a method to ship a message, each to enemies and to reassure the area people throughout unsure occasions.
A extra down-to-earth clarification is that the skulls got here from an outdated ossuary that was once subsequent to the churchyard. These buildings have been used to retailer bones when there wasn't sufficient house within the cemetery. When the constructing was taken down or cleaned out, the skulls might need been positioned within the wall to maintain them secure and remembered.
The skulls aren't the one human stays as soon as related to the church. For a few years, the Haraldskær Girl, a remarkably well-preserved bathroom physique over 2,500 years outdated, was displayed right here in a glass-covered sarcophagus earlier than being relocated to a neighborhood museum.
