ORIA CONFRATERNITY MUMMIES

(PUGLIA)

30 Kilometers west of Brindisi, in the extreme South of Italy, just in the heel of the Italian boot, you can have a face to face with the astonishing mummies of the DEATH CONFRATERNITY !!!

You have to find the Main Cathedral of ORIA, a small village on a hill founded by the Normands of Frederick II of Svevia (a king of Viking roots) in the Middle Age. Once you have entered the Church, then you have to be very lucky, as you have to find the guardinan of the DEATH CONFRATERNITY waiting for the rare tourists visiting this strange place.

He can be there in the late morning but he could even miss the guard at the entrance for many days.. You just have to be lucky... Indeed the access to the crypt of the mummies is independent from the entrance of the Cathedral and though the crypt is under the Church and you have to enter taking a stairway that begins from the Oratory, the Death Confraternity is the exclusive owner of the crypt.

If the guardian is there, he will stand just on the left of the main entrance of the Cathedral, just in front of the Oratory, where the stairs to the crypt starts..

The crypt was built in the XVI Cent. From XVIII Cent. the first members of this non-confessional Confraternity that professed a kind of religious Freemasonry, started to be inhumed there, standing up in some niches digged from the wall made of tufa.

Now the crypt is still containing 9 mummified corpses. Several mummies 8the most deteriorated) have been moved elsewhere (probably buried in a cemetery).

Many skulls, some of them still provided with dried skin, have been placed over the niches.

The mummies, all belonging to men (the Confraternity is inhibited to women) are the conseguence of a natural process of dehydration.

Below, the mummy that I think is the most frightening of the group !