Fueled by our lifelong fascination with the extraordinary
and the eccentric, Europe continues to expand its sizable selection of macabre
museums, as Anna J. Kutor discovers

“When I die, can my favorite football and red fire truck be buried next to me?,” is just one of the
cringe-inducing questions I overheard a five-year-old ask his mother the other
day. In any other place, this would sound terribly absurd and appalling, but it
actually fit right in while standing over an open white wooden casket filled
with cigarettes, silver cooking pans, a lime-green plastic lamp, a boombox, and
a pair of pink-laced tennis shoes. We were witnessing a decidedly offbeat
collection of coffins and funerary heirlooms, as part of the newly opened
Nederlands Uitvaart Museum ‘Tot Zover’, or Dutch Funerary Museum ‘Thus Far’ in
Amsterdam.

Death. For some, it’s just an inevitable end to life that is better ignored, while for
others, it’s a source of intrigue and curiosity. For Dutch art historian Guus
Sluiter, death is an essential part of life that is meant to be observed,
respected - and diligently documented. As the director of the Funerary Museum,
Sluiter’s dedication to end-of-life rituals and the  cultural differences of death and dying were
key in designing the diverse display of death-related artifacts. The collection
- arranged around descriptive themes such as Mourning and Remembering, Rituals,
and the Body - ranges from mummification tools to surgical implants that
survived the heat of the crematorium oven, as well as dubiously-named hair
paintings and coffins showcasing different religion’s funerary practices. And
then there are the faux-skeletons, Elvis posters and computer screen with the
words ‘game over’ featured in the the Mememto Mori section (Latin for ‘remember
you must die’) where the lighter side of loss is explored. Far from being a
palace of the macabre, the museums premises and location, smack dab in the
middle of the Nieuwe Oosterbegraafplaats cemetery, serves as a sombre reminder
of the magnitude of death

In the Dutch cradle of cannabis and
contemporary life, it is no surprise that one can find a specter of shocking
and stimulating cultural institutions, such as those devoted to scaring the
living daylights out of an audience. The Torture Museum, conveniently situated alongside the
Single canal in front of the floating Flower Market, sets a particularly
unnerving scene with its dark-lit demonstration of pain-inflicting contraptions
through the ages. Sure, it’s much more of a tourist trap than a cultural
big-hitter (as are most torture-centered museums in Europe, namely in Prague,
Gdansk and Vienna), but getting an up close and personal view of hanging cages,
skull crackers and a real-life inquisition chair, can genuinely give you the
hebejebes. For a double shot of fear and a madcap chaser, head over to the
Amsterdam Dungeon where
Holland’s historical brutalities are turned into an adrenaline-raising
attraction, complete with chillingly dramatized stories of the Dutch East India
Company, a mirror maze and a rollercoaster ride. This petrifying playground is
part of a Europe-wide chain of haunted houses, so fear-loving fans can freak
out at other branches in London, Edinburgh and Hamburg.

Photo courtesy of Corpus

Surreal Sights

Perhaps the most culturally eclectic city
in Europe, Paris is home to a variety of wickedly woeful exhibitions that spawn
spine-chilling sensations. The assortment of diseased and deformed anatomical
specimens of the medical museum Musée Dupuytren (15 rue de l’Ecole de Médecine,
+33 (1)4329 2860) and the gruesomely deformed and artistically preserved
skinned cadavers of the Fragonard Museum (7 Avenue du Général de Gaulle, +33
(1)4393 7172, http://musee.vet-alfort.fr) are obviously creepy sights to
behold. So too is the peculiar window display and shop of Julien Aurouze (8 rue
des Halles, +33 (1)4041 1620), a pest exterminator company with
an evocative visual style. This long established vermin-control center is
fronted by an oversized sign reading ‘Destruction of Nuisant Animals’ and an
attention-grabing vitrine filled with two orderly rows of dangling stuffed rat
corpses and rodent poison. Inside, a whole slew of bothersome beasts are
arranged ceremoniously behind glass alongside the menacing tools and elixirs of
their liquidation, which boasts creative solutions to all pesky problems.

Not to be outdone in the competition of surreal sights, the robust Soveit-era
statues in Budapest’s Statue Park (corner of Balatoni út and Szabadkai utca) continue to portray the heavy-handed propaganda
of the Communist era. A fearsome, six-meter-tall figure of Lenin guards the
red-brick gates of this open-air necropolis, based near the borders of Buda.
These dozens of massive monuments of megalomaniac Communist leaders and
strapping workers from Soviet Socialist realist times once graced the streets
and squares of the Hungarian capital. The pervasive sense of power and
utopistic imagery is leveled with a heaping dose of irony and capitalistic entrepreneurship at the museum’s quirky gift shop, where sightseers can by the
‘last breath of communism’ sealed securely in a tin can.

A little less idealistic, but a good deal more gut-wrenching is the traveling cadaver exhibit, ”Bodies… The
Exhibition”, stationed in Budapest’s VAM Design Center through the year. Getting quite
literally under skin, this controversial collection shows a number of real
human body specimens and organs carefully dissected, preserved in polymer and
arranged in dynamic body-in-motion poses. Whether you find it educational,
entertaining or offensive, it will undoubtedly be an out-of-body experience.

Leftovers of Love

Topping off Europe’s bizarre parade of artful displays is Museum of Broken Relationships, a touring exhibition
criss-crossing Europe since 2006, that lands in Slovakia’s Nitra Museum
in October. Established by Croatian artists Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić as a
creative way of coping with their own failed affair, the museum is a stirring
visual show of painful experiences as it displays hundreds of sentimental
objects donated by heartbroken people the world over. Alongside love letters,
stuffed animals, engagement rings and photo-printed underpants, this divorce
donor center features some idiosyncratic remnants such as a prosthetic leg, a
get-away bike and a hatchet used to smash the ex’s stuff. Well, when I die,
I’ll definitely put my once-beloved belongings in the grave…not on display.