The Bone Church
The ossuary in the All Saints’ Chapel (kapel Všech svatý) in Kutná Hora (well, actually Sedlec) is decorated in human bones. Sounds pretty strange, huh? Morbid, in fact…
The story is, an Abbot returned from Jerusalem in the 13th Century with a pocketful of earth from Golgotha and sprinkled it on the graveyard, causing it to be a sought-after burial ground. When the Plague swept through Europe, many of the dead also ended up here, resulting in some 30,000 people being buried there. As gravesites were abolished, the remaining bones piled up in the chapel, where they were stacked into pyramids by a monk there in 1511. In 1870 František Rint, a woodcarver, created his bone art from these remians to adorn the ossuary. The chandelier in the middle of the room contains every bone in the human body.
I grabbed the train to Kutná Hora in the morning, an hour away at 114Kc( roundtrip. It was just a short walk from the train station to the ossuary. While exploring the chapel, I ran into Claire, the Aussie I’d met on the train on the way in. Once we had had our fill of the area, we got back on the train to head back to Praha and grabbed some food. Francisco was now in town, so I made plans to meet up with him and his two friends, Kath and Jimenez, that evening, and invited Claire to meet us there. We went to the Chateau Rouge, the bar I’d gone to my first night in Prague. Once getting back to my hostel, I ran into Sofia, a Portuguese student also from my conservatory. She was there with a couple others I knew from school. Holy hell, the coincidences just keep comin’…
Tags: Czech Republic, Europe, Travel
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