After they died, the wealthiest and most prominent residents of 18th-century Vilnius, Lithuania, were interred beneath the Dominican Church of the Holy Spirit, in the center of town. Decades later, they were joined by the bodies of Napoleonic troops who had perished while headed home to France after their defeat in Russia.

Of the 500 bodies thought to have been buried beneath the Dominican Church of the Holy Spirit, about 200 were naturally mummified. The rest, like this skull covered in fly remains, decomposed.

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The tombs were also employed by the living. When Vilnius was overrun by the Polish army in World War I, and by the Nazis in World War II, when the crypt was used as a bomb shelter. But the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ bodies inside endured—even when the Soviets tried to turn the hidden cellars into a museum celebrating atheism.