Kutná Hora - the bone church

There's definitely something creepy about human bones displayed in carefully orchestrated chandeliers, ornamenting a place a worship.

Getting there: Drive 1.5 hrs from Prague. (120km)

Public Transport: There are buses and trains from Prague to Kutná Hora. "czech" out the czech transport website or lookup trains and busses in English.

You can easily take the train from Prague's main train station (Praha Hlavní Nádraž) to Kutná Hora (Kutna Hora Hlavní Nádraž) and then walk from the train station into the Sedlec Ossuary (1km walk).

Hours: November to February 9am to 4pm, October & March 9am to 5pm, April to September 8am to 6pm. Admission tickets cost 90Kč for adults and 60Kč for children.Buy your tickets at the info center 200m from the church.

This village is definitely worth a day trip from Prague. Kutná Hora became listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995, and since then it's been gathering more and more attention. One of the most famous attractions in this village is the Sedlec Ossuary or the "bone church" as many people call it.

After a long car ride from Trenčín, we arrived in Kutná Hora.

The Sedlec Ossuary is decorated with somewhere between 40,000-70,000 skeletons. At first, I wasn't quite sure how I felt about seeing a church made up of human bones...but it just seems too intriguing not to satisfy my curiosity. I figured after seeing the catacombs in Paris it couldn't be much creepier, right? I was wrong. There's definitely something more creepy about human bones displayed in carefully orchestrated chandeliers and ornamenting a place a worship. Definitely creepy.

You might think that this church is one of a kind, but there are actually more bone churches in Europe. There's one in Brno in Czechia, one in Evora, Portugal and a few other places.

So what's unique about this bone church?

In the 13th century, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Sedlec went to the Holy Land where he collected a small amount of earth from Golgotha--the gravesite of Jesus Christ. When the abbot returned he scattered the earth in the abbey cemetery. Word spread and people began to want to be buried throughout Bohemia and Central Europe because they believed that being close to the scattered earth from the Holy Land would allow them, too, to rise from the dead after 3 days like Jesus Christ did.

And then... there were just a lot of dead people (apparently that "Holy Soil" didn't help them all that much). The 14th and 15th centuries brought the Black Death or Plague and the Hussite wars. There just wasn't enough room for all the bodies in the cemetery. So, in about the year 1400 a church was built with a vaulted upper level and a lower chapel that could be used as an ossuary for mass graves.

There was a half-blind monk who was tasked with exhuming skeletons and arranging the bones into stacks to clear up room for more burials. (Where is HR to file an employee complaint when you need them?)

Yet, legend holds that he regained his sight after performing this task. Maybe his job wasn't so terrible after all.

It seems that the bones were destined for a more artistic future, however, than the simple, stacked pyramids created by the monk. The Schwarzenberg family in 1970 hired a woodcarver, František Rint, to arrange the heaps of bones in a more artistic way. He came up with the decorative motif that adorns the Sedlec Ossuary today. The coat of arms (pictured previously) is made from human bones and skulls and depicts the Schwarzenberg family coat of arms.