A chapel built from human bones
The Sedlec Ossuary is a Roman Catholic chapel under the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora, part of the former Sedlec Abbey. It holds the remains of an estimated 40,000 to 70,000 people, and more than 200,000 people visit each year.
In 1278 Henry, abbot of the Cistercian monastery, brought earth from Golgotha back from the Holy Land and sprinkled it over the abbey cemetery. It became a desirable burial site across Central Europe, and burials during the Black Death and after the Hussite Wars forced it to be greatly enlarged.
A Gothic church with a lower ossuary chapel was built around 1400 for the exhumed bones, and a Baroque rebuild by Jan Santini Aichel followed in 1703 to 1710. In 1870 the woodcarver František Rint, employed by the Schwarzenberg family, arranged the bones into the decoration seen today.
The decoration includes a chandelier containing at least one of every bone in the human body, garlands of skulls, four bell-shaped mounds and a Schwarzenberg coat of arms made of bones.
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