Many of you are probably thinking: Why haven’t they gone up to see the castle yet!  It’s so spectacular!  I don’t know, but we never did end up going to see the castle.  We heard rumors of another sight not far from Prague that sounded so much more unique and exciting to me that we went there instead!  It was the Sedlec Ossuary, a church whose cellar is completely full of (and decorated with) human bones!  This is not the type of thing that even exists in the US so we jumped at the chance to go.  It took a two hour train ride to get to the town, a suburb of the city of Kutna Hora.

Sedlec Ossuary

In fact there were many other things to see in Kutna Hora – in the 1400s it competed with Prague – but we didn’t really have time to go around town anyway.  We pretty much just took the 15 minute walk from the train station, past the Phillip Morris factory (which really stank!), past an unremarkable cathedral, and up to the ossuary.  I’ll let several pictures speak for themselves and then talk a little bit about how this place came to be.

Ossuary Entrance

The artist's "signature"

Coat of Arms - IN BONES

Cherub WITH BONES

Big Pile O Bones

Bone Chapel

Bone Chalice

So I guess the story goes that some abbott or other took some soil from Calvary, the place thought to have been where Jesus was crucified, and spread it on some ground in Sedlec.  This made it a holy place, and many people wanted to be buried there.  So when the Black Death came through, everyone was put into mass graves at this site.  Eventually somebody said “Hey shouldn’t this graveyard have a church” so they said “yeah!” and started building the church.  But so many people were buried there that they had to excavate the bones of between 40 and 70 THOUSAND people just to dig the foundation!  Then they were like, “what should we do with these things” and gave a job to a local woodcarver – organize this huge pile of bones.  He was apparently more macabre than they thought and made all the decorations of this ossuary.

Bone Chandelier

A cool fact about this bone chandelier is that it contains at least one of every bone in the human body! Cool!