Over the following century this ossuary would fill up fast. It was common practice in those years to relieve burial space by stacking bones closely in dedicated vaults and the Sedlec Ossuary was just one of many such repositories built across Europe in the late medieval period. The ossuary was constructed sometime around 1400, a small chapel beneath the gothic-styled Church of All Saints. By the time the Black Death arrived in the 14th century, killing thousands in its wake, the monks at Sedlec were being delivered more corpses than they knew what to do with. Word spread throughout Central Europe, and the cemetery at Sedlec Abbey expanded at a rapid rate. When the abbot sprinkled soil from Golgotha on the cemetery back home in Sedlec, this grand blessing served to promote it to the most fashionable burial site in all Bohemia.

He visited Golgotha, the hill outside Jerusalem where Jesus Christ was said to have been crucified. The Bible translates Golgotha as, ‘the place of the skull’ and according to some Jewish and Christian traditions, the skull of Adam himself is believed to be buried here beneath the mound. In the late 13th century – when Sedlec was a part of the Kingdom of Bohemia – an abbot from the town’s Cistercian monastery made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The Sedlec Ossuary, believe it or not, has a story that some would trace as far back as the Garden of Eden. Meanwhile, at the heart of the ossuary hangs a chilling centrepiece a macabre work of exquisite craftsmanship, a vast chandelier which uses every bone in the human body at least once – its seven arms terminating in grinning skulls that have leered down over the nave of this small Czech chapel for almost 150 years. Inside this dimly-lit vault, skulls hang festooned from arches while bleached bones form decorative features and family crests. Nevertheless, the Sedlec Ossuary at Kutná Hora is perhaps the best-known ‘bone church’ in the world… largely due to the artistic precision with which its skeletons have been arranged. The Sedlec Ossuary is situated beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints, in a town that features prominently on the Czech tourist trail but amongst Kutná Hora’s numerous churches, cathedrals, Jesuit colleges and museums, the ossuary stands out as one of Europe’s most notorious dark tourism destinations.Īlthough the exact figure is not known, the chapel is reckoned to contain the skeletons of somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 people. However, Sedlec is not the Czech Republic’s only ossuary (or ‘kostnice’). A quieter, less-frequented ossuary can be found in Mělník, while the Brno Ossuary is larger with a confirmed total of 50,000 human remains (making it the second largest in Europe, after the Paris Catacombs).

In Kutná Hora, a city just 70km east of the Czech capital, there is a modest Roman Catholic chapel whose interior is decorated with the polished skeletal remains of thousands upon thousands of human beings.

Skull and bones bohemia