The family that IIdiko Szikossy takes care of died in the first years of the 1800s.

When she met up with them at the Carnegie Science Center recently, they had traveled in climate-controlled trucks from Phoenix. She had flown from Budapest, where she is an anthropologist at the Hungarian Natural History Museum.

Weeks before the Oct. 5 opening of the “Mummies of the World” exhibit here, a dozen curators came together to unpack the 125 mummies and related artifacts for which they are responsible at each stop on the world tour. It will be at the science center through April 19, 2020 in Pittsburgh.

It is the largest traveling collection of mummies, which come from all parts of the world including a bog in the Netherlands, South American caves, Egyptian sarcophagi and a crypt in Hungary.

Diana Nelson Jones

Mummies the word this fall at Carnegie Science Center

The exhibit represents examples of natural and artificial mummification.

Many cultures mummified their dead to continue to see them as they looked in life and to honor them, including the Incas and Egyptians.

Natural mummification is more rare because the microclimate has to be just right to stop decomposition. Bacteria need water and oxygen to consume a dead body. Some of the places where natural mummies have been found are bogs, deserts, caves and salt deposits.

“That’s my family,” she said, beaming and extending her arm toward three white, wooden crates that held Veronika (Veronica) and Mihaly (Michael) Orlovits and their 1-year-old son, Janoska, (John), who is identified in death as Johannes, per the Latin. They are three specimens among 265 mummified bodies that were found in a crypt under a Roman Catholic Church in the town of Vac, Hungary, located on the east bank of the Danube. Vac is pronounced Vas.

According to The Guardian in a 2015 report, the crypt — which held bodies of people who died between 1731 to 1838 — had been long forgotten when a renovation crew began excavating. A construction worker tapped on a wall that sounded hollow. He removed a brick. Part of the wall caved in and he beheld 265 coffins stacked floor to ceiling.

The Orlovits family has traveled once or twice a year for exhibits since 2010. Ms. Szikossy flies to each exhibit city twice — to prepare the mummies for the opening and to wrap them back up at the end for transport to the next site. By contract, only the curators may do this.

“My mummies are very heart-touching,” said Ms. Szikossy. “They were found in beautiful dress, with the date and age of death. To study mummies you need to have empathy. They have stories to tell us.

“My daughter says Janoska is my second child,” she said. “I have feelings for them. I talk to them. I’m happy to see them every time.”

The Orlovits family all died within a year, the parents of tuberculosis.

“We know from tissue studies that 70% of the Vac mummies were infected with TB,” she said. “There were carbonated dots on the lungs.”

The baby likely died not of TB but a high fever, and very suddenly, she said. “He was chubby, which tells us that he had no time to lose weight.”

Only three among the Vac mummies are on tour.

“The people buried under the church believed they were one step closer to God. They paid to be buried there.

“This family had a very short and sad history. The father was a miller. The mother lost three children. The oldest lived to 2½ years. This was the life in the 18th century. Not that long ago. The TB was very high in that population and smallpox was an epidemic. This is a message to anti-vaxers.”

Wearing rubber gloves, she began unwrapping layers of paper from around little Janoska. A small group of people strained forward to watch. The anticipation was rooted in the fascination humans have for things macabre and informed by cheesy movies and Halloween songs.

But when she lifted the last layer off, she revealed a baby boy in a lace-trimmed bonnet, a blue-and-white striped skirt and smock with scalloped sleeves and hem. The clothes are replicas of the originals, browned the way paper browns. The skin is browned, too.

She lifted the skirt to show the chubby thighs, which, devoid of fluid, had flattened, with some creases.

His mouth is open a bit. Baby teeth look very different in the mouth of a face that is intact than in a skeleton. They look like baby teeth.

“It’s sad to read words about how high child mortality was in the 18th century,” she said, “but you feel it more when you see the child.”

The long fingers of his right hand rest over his left. His fingernails brought up a teaching moment: “Fingernails don’t grow after death,” she said, dashing a common misbelief. “The skin recedes for lack of fluids.”

Ms. Szikossy removed the paper booties that protected his feet. What looked like a piece of medical gauze just below the left knee is the vestige of an original sock. The rope around his ankles was tied in place, she said, “so he could not disturb the living people.”

His parents’ ankles are bound in rope, too. It was believed that by tying the legs together the spirit was inhibited from moving about.

After setting Janoska, which translates to little John, onto the surface of his exhibit box, she pulled wrinkles from his skirt and smock, lifted the rim of the bonnet off his forehead and gently swept dust from his sleeves with a small brush.

She took many close-up photos of every part of him, as she would do of his parents when she unwrapped them. This is done at every stop on the tour as a record for comparing how the mummies fare with each transport, said Donna Westrich, general manager of the exhibition.

These mummies and related artifacts all come sanctioned by governments, institutions or families along with documents, she said, when asked about the controversy that surrounded the Real Bodies exhibition last year in Australia. 

Protesters were concerned that the plasticized bodies in the exhibit had once been political prisoners in China and questioned whether they had been ethically obtained. A similar show sparked controversy in Pittsburgh in 2007-2008, when the science center hosted “Bodies...The Exhibition” for seven months. It included 15 full-body corpses from China that were flayed, dissected, plasticized and posed, in addition to 200 other body parts and specimens. A former science center education coordinator resigned in protest over the show.

“We did an ethics study for this [mummies] exhibit and it is addressed in the opening video,” Ms. Westrich said.

The Vac mummies are famous in the world of anthropology. The sheer number provided great opportunities to investigate the health and medical histories of that time in that place.

“There were no vaccinations or antibiotics then, so many very young children died of epidemics,” Ms. Szikossy said, adding that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates funded the research.

Mummies are valuable to medical, archaeological and cultural research through the use of CT scans, X-rays, DNA analysis, radiocarbon dating, rapid prototyping and stable isotope analysis.

“This [exhibit] is not just a show,” Ms. Szikossy said. “The mummies want to tell us their stories, and as technology develops, we can learn even more.

“We can learn a lot about life from death.”

Diana Nelson Jones: djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626. Twitter@dnelsonjones. The Mummies of the World exhibition runs through April 19.

First Published: October 1, 2019, 12:00 p.m.