It’s no secret that I like morbid things. In fact, the weirder the better. Anytime I travel, the first thing I’m looking for is a museum dedicated to medical oddities, history of torture, or natural history museums with animal and dinosaur skeletons. When I first read about the Bone Church in Kutna Hora, Czechoslovakia, I made sure to note it on my ever evolving bucket list.
On our recent trip to Prague, I made sure that one day was devoted to taking a day trip to neighboring Kutna Hora, no matter how under the weather I felt. As Prague was full of tourists, it was easy to book a half-day trip using the app Get A Guide.
What is the Sedlec Ossuary “Bone Church”? This comes from Atlas Obscura:
“Known to most as “The Bone Church,” it displays some of the world’s more macabre art. In addition to a splendid bone chandelier composed of almost every bone in a human body, the ossuary displays two large bone chalices, four baroque bone candelabras, six enormous bone pyramids, two bone monstrances (a vessel used to display the Eucharistic host), a family crest in (you guessed it) bone, and skull candle holders. Festively looping chains of bone are hung throughout like crepe paper at a birthday party.
Sedlec Ossuary has a long history, beginning in the 13th century when the Abbot of the Sedlec Monastery (Abbot Henry) brought a handful of earth back from a journey to the Grave of the Lord in Jerusalem. He scattered this “holy soil” across the Sedlec cemetery, securing its place as one of the most desired burial sites for people all over Bohemia and the surrounding countries. Everyone wanted to be buried in that handful of the Holy Land and more than 30,000 were. But it wasn’t long before there simply wasn’t enough room for everyone to rest in peace, and the bodies were moved to a crypt to make room for the newly dead.
In 1870, a local woodcarver, František Rint was employed for the dark task of artistically arranging the thousands of bones. Rint came up with the Bone Church’s stunning chandelier, as well as the amazing Schwarzenberg coat of arms, which includes a raven pecking at the severed head of a Turk–all made of human bone. Rint was responsible for bleaching all of the bones in the ossuary in order to give the room a uniform look. His artist’s signature is still on the wall today–naturally, in his medium of choice, bone.”
What better day to visit such a place than Easter Sunday?
The church itself was actually pretty small, with a line of tourists waiting to visit. We were allowed to wander on our own and take many pictures.
At each end of the chapel were piles and piles of bones behind a caged archway, but throughout there were bones and skulls carefully decorating the rest every nook and cranny.
Overall, we weren’t there longer than 30 minutes since the ossuary was so small. We spent the rest of the time on a walking tour of Kutna Hora, where we also visited the St. Barbara’s Cathedral (equally as interesting as the bone church, if not more) and had a traditional Czech meal at a tavern.
Should you find yourself in Prague, I would definitely recommend checking out Kutna Hora – but dress warm if it’s not the summer. Neither the chapel nor the cathedral are heated, and it was bitterly cold.
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What a fascinating place, never knew about it!