Entering the gothic Bone Church of Sedlec, it’s a strange sort of beauty that awaits at the bottom of the stairs. Bones are everywhere. Human bones. Forty-some-odd-thousand of them to be exact. Originally arranged in neatly stacked piles by a half-blind monk in the early 16th century, the chandeliers, columns and decorative shields of the noble Schwarzenberg family were created later by a Czech wood-carver, Frantisek Rindt beginning in 1870. He used the bones and skulls of the dead warriors who fought in the Hussite Wars in the early part of the 16th century.

In 1278, the abbot of Sedlec went to the Holy Land and brought back a jar full of earth which was spread over the cemetery. This made the cemetery one of the holiest places in central Europe to be buried. By 1318 there were over 30,000 bodies buried here, many of them died due to the plague. The All Saint’s Kostinice was built in 1400 and the ossuary was added in 1511. The church itself is built of stone, not bones, it is merely the decoration that is takes abstract human form.

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