Sedlec Ossuary

The Sedlec Ossuary is a small Gothic chapel on the grounds of Sedlec Abbey whose entire interior has been decorated with the bones of approximately 40,000 people. The bones came from the cemetery that surrounded the abbey, which had been a sought-after burial site since the 13th century when an abbot returned from Jerusalem with a jar of earth from Golgotha and scattered it on the ground. In the waves of plague and conflict that followed, the cemetery grew to enormous size. When the cemetery was cleared in the 15th century, the bones were stacked inside the chapel; in 1870, the remarkable interior decoration was created.

The effect inside is genuinely extraordinary rather than merely gloomy. The scale and craftsmanship of the arrangements — the chandeliers, the garlands, the heraldic imagery — push it beyond the morbid into something closer to the baroque tradition of vanitas art. Photographs are permitted and taken constantly. The ossuary is a five-minute walk from the Sedlec train station, which is a stop earlier than the main Kutná Hora station on the line from Prague — worth knowing if you want to see it before continuing to the town centre.

things to do sight
A story
The ossuary was created by František Rint, a local woodcarver hired in 1870 to "put the bones in order." He interpreted his brief with unsettling creativity, constructing four bell-shaped piles of skulls in the corners, a chandelier said to contain every bone in the human body, a coat of arms for the Schwarzenberg family (the landowners), and his own signature — rendered in bones — at the base of one of the ossuary's arched supports. It is the only known case of an artist signing a work made of human remains.