CIMETIÈRE SAINT-HILAIRE

The cemetery of Marville is located on the hill Saint-Hilaire, place of origin of the village before its installation on the rocky spur located on the other bank of the Crédon. The cemetery is reached by a path of more than 500 metres. Once through the gate of the cemetery, a path leads to the 12th century church of Saint-Hilaire, the original church of Marville before the church of Saint-Nicolas was built. On the left, the alley runs alongside the former house of the cemetery caretaker and on the right, its former garden, which now houses the new cemetery. Further on the right is the ossuary. Rich merchants and ducal officers representing the provosts of Luxembourg and Lorraine lived in Marville. During their lifetime, they had sumptuous hotels built in the village and erected monuments of the same status over their graves for posterity, as only noble families or benefactors of the parish could be buried in or near the church of Saint-Hilaire It was not until 1875 and the intervention of an inspector from the Monuments Historiques that the oldest and most interesting funerary monuments were put in security in the church of Saint-Hilaire, which has since been transformed into an astonishing lapidary museum. The ossuary was built at the end of the 15th or 16th century. It was intended to collect the skulls and bones exhumed each time a new burial was opened. Of the five to six hundred currently listed in Lorraine, only about thirty remain today. That of Marville is the only one still preserved in Meuse. A sign on its façade states that it contains 40,000 skulls. But following the dismantling and reassembly of these skulls between 2015 and 2021 to allow the restoration of the building, only 6,000 skulls and complete remains of the deceased were counted, representing about 40,000 bones, hence the confusion.