Sedlec Ossuary

Beneath the small Gothic cemetery church of All Saints in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora, lies one of the strangest interiors in Europe. The ossuary holds the bones of an estimated 40,000 to 70,000 people, and a great many of them have been arranged into decoration: a chandelier that includes at least one of every bone in the human body, garlands of skulls hung across the vaults, piers and monstrances beside the altar, and a coat of arms of the Schwarzenberg family, all built of bone. In the four corners stand bell-shaped mounds of skeletons.

The origin of the collection is medieval. In 1278 the abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Sedlec returned from the Holy Land with a handful of earth from Golgotha and scattered it over the abbey cemetery, which made the ground a coveted burial place across Central Europe. The Black Death in the 14th century and the Hussite Wars in the 15th filled it with thousands of graves, and around 1400 the church was built in the middle of the cemetery with a lower chapel to take the bones from mass graves and cleared plots. Local tradition says that after 1511 a half-blind monk of the order began stacking the exhumed skeletons there.

The present arrangement is the work of František Rint, a woodcarver hired by the Schwarzenbergs in 1870 to put the heaps of bones in order, and he signed his work in bone on the wall by the entrance. The upper church was remodelled between 1703 and 1710 to designs by Jan Santini Aichel. The effect is macabre but carefully composed, and the ossuary draws more than 200,000 visitors a year. It belongs to the Kutná Hora World Heritage Site, together with the town's historic centre and the Cathedral of Our Lady at Sedlec.

Getting there

Sedlec is part of Kutná Hora, about 2 km from the historic town centre. Kutná Hora lies on the Prague–Brno railway, and one of its stations is Kutná Hora-Sedlec. Pardubice Airport (PED) is about 33 km away.