Excavation exhumes hundreds of corpses from mass grave beneath upmarket Paris store
Shoppers unaware of mass grave under their feet and archaeologists are working against the clock to recover bodies from hospital cemetery
For Parisian shoppers browsing the racks of newly arrived lingerie on the ground floor of the Monoprix store on the busy Boulevard Sebastopol, there was little to suggest anything unusual.
As they queued for baguettes, croissants and loaves at the boulangerie counter - also on the ground floor - most were blissfully unaware that a few metres below them archaeologists were brushing away centuries of sand and dirt to reveal hundreds of skeletons in mass graves.
"It's rather a bizarre thought," said Pierre, a retired civil servant, as he clutched his bread stick on Monday. "Still, there's all sorts of odd things buried under Paris."
At the last count the remains of at least 200 people have been uncovered, and experts believe there may be more, victims of a sudden and devastating disease or catastrophe.
The discovery was made when the store applied to convert its cellar for extra storage space.
Knowing that the building sat on the site of a hospital dating back to the middle ages, managers called in archaeologists to check for human remains. Nobody expected them to find much; most of the bodies buried in the hospital grounds had been disinterred when the building was destroyed in the early 19th century.
But as the archaeological team dug a little deeper, they were astonished to find scores of skeletons in a mass grave.
