Sedlec Ossuary at Kutna Hora
Hussite Wars, half-blind priests, Silver Miners
A Chapel Built from the Bones of 40,000 People
During one of our days in Prague, we drove to the nearby small town of Kutná Hora, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We didn’t actually visit the town center, though — we were there to see the Sedlec Ossuary, which is in the suburb of Sedlec.
Outside, it looks like this.
In the 1300s, Kuntá Hora, an area rich in silver mines, became a favorite spot of several Kings of Boehmia. For centuries the city competed with Prague as a cultural and economic center until the 16th century, when the Habsburgs took over the region and the whole city fell apart. The mines flooded and were abandoned, the Hussite Wars raged through the region, and waves of plague took countless lives.
Sedlec Ossuary
Those countless claimed lives had to be buried, of course, and many people wanted to be buried at the Cemetery Church of All Saints, where the cemetery allegedly contained a small amount of dirt from Golgotha (the site when Jesus Christ died on the cross).
But in 1400, the church was built atop the cemetery and a lot of bodies were exhumed during the construction. A half-blind priest took all those bones, allegedly of 40,000 people, and stacked them in the basement Ossuary. As the legend goes, after his work was complete, his eyesight was restored.
Bone chalice in Sedlec Ossuary.
It’s said that some of the bones were arranged in these unusual, decorative patterns, but it wasn’t fully finished until 1870, when the influential Schwarzenberg family (who still owns the abbey) hired a woodcarver to complete this work.
Sedlec Ossuary bone chandelier.
In each of the four corners of the ossuary large numbers of bones are stacked in bell-shaped towers. A chandelier, said to contain at least one type of bone in the human body, hangs form the ceiling, and in one corner there’s a large elaborate heraldic crest of the House of Schwarzenberg made up entirely of human bones.
House of Schwarzenberg bone crest at Sedlec Ossuary.
The ossuary is in the basement, so cold and dark. Along the back wall, between two of the bell-shaped towers of bones, there’s a small alcove that contains a chapel with a large crucifix. It was a macabre, interesting, and fantastic place to visit.
Bones