Posted by pietro on Thursday, June 1, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.

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For three days in our last week in Sicily we traveled to the small island port of Siracusa.  A city that was much more prominent in Sicily’s history, it is very large but draws less tourists than Cefalù.  On one of our days there we toured the catacombs, ancient tombs beneath the city.  They were carved out of an old aquaduct in order to bury many who died.  There was not a lot of ornate architecture in the catacombs, as they were mostly empty shelves which once held dead bodies.  The bodies that lay in the catacombs were moved to a mass cemetery to allow people to visit the ancient structure.  There were various sizes, even ranging to only about a foot long to hold any baby that sadly did not make it past infancy.  The Sicilians were able to fit ten thousand graves in ten thousand square meters due to excellent planning and stacking of the graves.  This is similar to modern day American crypts where bodies can be seen in drawers stacked in shelves above ground to make efficient use of space.  There were some carvings of saints and a few symbols scattered throughout the catacombs.  One of these symbols is an alpha followed by an omega, the first and last letters in the greek alphabet.  They are usually accompanied by a cross to symbolize that from the beginning to the end, there is God.  Back at Vanderbilt, I am engaged in the fraternity Alpha Tau Omega.  The organization is founded on Christian principles and the letters represent the same thing as the logo in the catacombs.  The Tau represents the cross that Jesus Christ was crucified on.  Therefore Jesus, and by extension, God, are omnipresent in our lives.  It was fascinating to see the history of an organization I am apart of meeting up with ancient history in an island across the world in graves that are hundreds of years old.