Dem bones ...

Ossuary church, Kutna Hora

When you next go to church, imagine what it would be like to look up and see a chandelier made out of human bones! That's exactly what can be found at the Sedlec Ossuary at the Church of all Saints in Kutna Hora, east of Prague. Today we took a tour to Kutna Hora in a thick snowstorm - seemed like a good idea on a day like today.

The history of the place isn't so macabre as you might think. The Cistercian abbot of the church went to Palestine in the 1200s and brought back some soil which he sprinkled in the church cemetery.

That made it a desirable place to be buried, and so many people were interred there, along with the many thousands of people killed by the plagues in the 14th century, that they had to dig up the central part and build an ossuary to put all the bones in. It is estimated that the bones of more than 40,000 were in the ossuary, many unidentied even at the time of burial due to the plague.

The head bone's connected to the neck bone ...

All the bones that were exhumed were stored there until the 1870s, when a woodcarver was given the job of organising the bones into some kind of respectful system. What he came up with was unusual - there are four bell-shaped towers of bones, mostly hip bones, at each corner, a coat of arms and an enormous chandelier of bones in the middle made up of at least one of each bone from the body. It all looks pretty freaky, but it seems it wasn't disrespectful - in fact the message the woodcarver apparently tried to convey was the transience of life and the inevitability of death!

We had lunch (the ubiquitous beef goulash with dumplings) then visited St Barbara's Cathedral, after the saint whose father threw her into prison because she wanted to be christened, despite the family's atheism. Apparently she miraculously escaped prison by causing walls to crumble before her. Anyway, she is the patron saint of miners, since Kutna Hora was THE silver mining centre of Bohemia, and there are numerous references to miners in the frescoes in the church. 

St Barbara's Cathedral, Kutna Hora

It's an amazing gothic cathedral built with flying buttresses - the solution to church collapse that came from the English and French stonemasons around 1000.

One advantage of the freezing cold is that there are hardly any other tourists around (our guide Martin probably wished we had stayed in bed today, too!)

No charge for chilling the chardonnay!