The Catacombs
In brief
The catacombs are the underground burial galleries — most famously beneath and around Rome — where the early Christians laid their dead. They are not mainly "hiding places," as legend often has it, but cemeteries: mile upon mile of tunnels lined with graves. On their walls survives the earliest Christian art, and at the tombs of the martyrs the first Christians gathered to pray and to celebrate the Eucharist. In the catacombs we can still see what the faith of the persecuted Church looked like.
Cities of the dead
Beneath the soft volcanic rock around Rome, Christians dug networks of narrow passages, sometimes on several levels, and cut shelves into the walls to hold their dead. The name catacomb comes from the Latin for a spot "near the hollows" by one such cemetery on the Appian Way; in time it came to name them all. Similar underground cemeteries survive at Naples, in Sicily, at Malta, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean world.
It is worth correcting a common picture. The catacombs were not primarily secret bunkers where the Church cowered from Rome; Roman law actually protected burial grounds, and the tunnels were too damp, dark, and well-known to hide a community for long. They were, above all, places to bury the dead — and Christians buried rather than burned their dead precisely because they confessed the resurrection of the body. During the worst persecutions the faithful did sometimes take shelter among the tombs and gather there for prayer, but that was the exception. The catacombs are mainly a vast, hopeful cemetery, laid out by people who believed their dead were only sleeping.
The earliest Christian art
On the plastered walls of the burial chambers, Christians painted the first Christian images we possess — modest, symbolic, and full of hope. Christ appears as the Good Shepherd, a young man carrying a lamb across his shoulders, an image of the Lord who seeks the lost and carries them home. Human figures stand with arms raised in prayer, the posture called the orant — the soul at peace before God. Old Testament scenes of rescue recur: Jonah cast up from the sea, Daniel among the lions, the three youths in the furnace, all read as promises of deliverance from death.
Above all there is the fish. The Greek word for fish, ichthys, spelled out an early confession of faith as an acrostic — "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour" — so that a simple fish scratched on a wall was a whole creed in a single sign. Alongside it appear the anchor of hope and scenes of a shared meal that point toward the Eucharist. These are not yet icons in the developed sense, and they belong to the wider world of early Christian symbols, but they show a Church already praying in pictures.
Prayer at the martyrs' tombs
The catacombs mattered most as places of prayer. The graves of the martyrs became gathering points: the faithful came to keep the martyr's feast, to ask his prayers, and to celebrate the Eucharist at his tomb. A simple slab over a grave served as the table, and the Church's later architecture remembers it. The custom of enclosing a saint's relics within the altar — still universal in Orthodox churches — grows directly out of these early liturgies offered over the bones of the witnesses.
So the catacombs join two things Orthodoxy has never separated: the honoring of the dead and the worship of God. To pray beside a martyr's grave was to confess that he was not lost but alive in Christ, part of the communion of saints that gathers around every altar. When persecution ended and the Church came up into the daylight to build great basilicas, she carried this conviction with her — and built her altars, quite literally, over the tombs of the saints.