People do the most interesting things.

Here is an interesting article, in part, courtesy of Chilean: Jairo Frisco Arenas Ramirez which I found quite interesting.

There exists a church decorated with human bones about 70 kilometers east the capital of the Czech Republic, Prague, lies a small town called Sedlec. It might have been an ordinary enough town, if not for its extraordinary church. The inside of this church is decorated with artworks made of real human bones.

In the year of thy lord 1278 the Cistercian abbot Henry embarked on a pilgrim voyage to the Holy Land (Palestine). This was more or less common practice for people of the church at the time. What he couldn't have imagined is the effect a little symbolic deed that he performed would have on the future of the little Sedlec church. While in Palestine abbot Henry visited the Golgotha and from there he brought back to Sedlec a jar full of earth. He referred to this as 'Holy Soil'. When he got back he spread the earth over the Sedlec cemetery and thus the cemetery begun to be considered as a piece of sacred land. The burial ground rapidly became one of the most popular in central Europe and people from all over the country and Europe came to Sedlec to get buried when they felt the strength of life diminishing. Many brought their dead relatives or friends to be buried in the holy soil of the Sedlec cemetery believing that the holyness of the ground was a sure way to guarantee the buried a place in heaven. Many corpses and bones were accumulated this way and especially during the times of the plague (the black death) many who were about to die from the disease came themselves to be buried in Sedlec. By 1318 over 30 000 bodies were buried there and this gave rise to the creation of the ossuary. .

The ossuary is located in the All Saints' Chapel built around 1400. The chapel is still surrounded by a functioning graveyard and if you take a careful look at the top of its towers you will see that that a "jolly roger", or a skull and crossbones, replace the usual Christian cross. The ossuary itself dates from 1511 when a half-blind monk was given the task to gather the bones from the abolished graves and putting them in the crypt to make place for new "customers". The task may seem somewhat macabre and unenviable but it served a practical purpose. A more questionable task than the one of the half-blind monk was the one of the local woodcarver who as late as 1870 was hired to decorate the inside of the Chapel with the human material (an approximate of40 000 sets of human bones) at his disposal.



The name of the artist was Frantisek Rindt and the employer was the Duke (Prince?) of Shwartzenberg. The coat of arms of the family Shwartzenberg was one of the creations evolved from the artists mind.

Another one is the chandelier which contains every human bone in the body, several times over, of course. However questionable the Ossuary - it is real. The bones are real. The feeling of death is real.
But also the feeling of peace. Most of the dead in the Ossuary died a "natural" i.e. non-violent death and the bones were removed from the ground to give more Christians the possibility to be buried on holy ground. It is a fact that the church is not made of bones as so many seem to think. The interior is decorated with human bones but it's a "normal" church made of stone and bricks. It is a normal (what is normal?) Christian church with a Christ on the cross figure and all the rest. It's not some weird cult or Satanist church or anything like that.

I think that next time G and I are in or around Prague, we shall have to check it out.