Kutná Hora

We've talked before about the ways I plan these tours. Often it starts with a bike route that I've found a map for or a city I know I can reach by train. This time it started with a picture of Sedlec Ossuary. 

I have come across ossuaries before - by chance in some of my many church visits. Up until now, I don't think I even knew that was what they were called.  A Ossuary you see is simply a place for bones. Apparently this can be anything fro

 a stone coffin to the wonderful display I saw today.

I set off after coffee and breakfast to finally see the Ossuary. Let's be clear, this was a visit that was ripe for disappointment. I've been building this up for ages. I love an usual place to visit and this seems like it should be out of the ordinary enough to satisfy.  Maybe that's why I saved it for day two?

Anyway. To the chapel. It's odd. Really odd. Beautiful. Interesting. It's certainly a momento mori. Again, it's built and evolved over centuries. And it's still evolving. They're doing preservation/restoration at the moment. At first, you look around and think. Yup. Ok. That's a lot of bones. Then you look at the repeating skull and crossbones motifs. And start to think - individuals? Then the piles (referred to as pyramids) - so many skulls and legs and arms. Then the decorations. How can bones be ornate?  How can they be illustrative - something else? How on earth can bones be fashioned into a crest?  It is beautiful. It is macabre. It is too much to understand all these skulls and bones as people. 

The All Saints Church cemetery is on land once sprinkled with soil from Golgotha. Legend has it that bodies buried here decompose so quickly that the bones are bleached white in three days.  The bone pyramids were built by a blind monk who upon their completion regained his sight. The decoration was completed by a František Rint. No one knows why he was chosen, he was apparently a saddler. 

I was excited, awe struck, curious. You want to touch it but you don't, shouldn't. It, each individual little bit of it, was a person once.  

And each individual bone (from upwards of 40,000 people. 40,000 once alive people) was cleaned (think of that - cleaned) and each bone was chosen as the right size or shape of fit. And then arranged in just the right way to show people just how close death is. As the guide book puts it, what we are - you will become. 

You are asked out of respect not to take photos in the chapel so here is the website for those as curious as me. 

https://www.sedlec.info/en/ossuary/before-visiting/

And, yes. The tiny chapel was a worthy sight on which to hang a whole tour.