Sedlec Ossuary

Step down from the daylight and the air changes. It is cooler here, and quieter, with a faint dry smell of old stone and older wood. Your eyes need a moment to adjust. Then the shapes on the walls begin to make sense. Those curved white forms are skulls. Those long pale rods are thigh bones. You are standing inside a small chapel decorated almost entirely with the remains of human beings, and that is exactly what the people who built it intended.

This is the Sedlec Ossuary, in the town of Sedlec, which today forms part of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. Above you sits the Cemetery Church of All Saints, a modest Gothic building with a graveyard around it. The ossuary is the lower chapel, below ground level. From outside, nothing prepares you for it. That contrast, an ordinary churchyard on top and this extraordinary room beneath, is part of the experience. Take a slow breath before you look closely.

To understand why so many bones ended up here, start with the monastery nearby. Sedlec was home to a Cistercian abbey, founded in the twelfth century. The Cistercians were a strict order of monks who valued work, prayer and simplicity. Their great abbey church still stands a short walk away. Over the following centuries, the monks' cemetery here grew into one of the most sought-after burial grounds in Central Europe. The reason has more to do with faith and story than with geography.

According to a long-told tradition, an abbot of Sedlec named Henry travelled to the Holy Land in the thirteenth century. He returned with a small amount of earth taken from Golgotha, the hill outside Jerusalem where Christians believe Jesus was crucified. He scattered it over this cemetery. Whether every detail of the story is true, nobody can say for certain. But people believed it. Word spread that this was holy ground, and families from far beyond Bohemia wanted their dead buried here.

Then came catastrophe. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death swept across Europe, and the cemetery filled quickly. In the early fifteenth century, the Hussite Wars brought more violence to the region. The Hussites were followers of the Czech reformer Jan Hus, and their conflict with the Catholic Church left deep scars here. More burials followed. The graveyard simply ran out of space. Around the year 1400, the church above you was built, and the lower chapel was set aside to hold exhumed bones.

This practice was common in medieval Europe. When a cemetery was full, older graves were opened and the bones moved into a charnel house, so that new burials could take place. What makes Sedlec different is what happened next. Locals say a half-blind monk of the order began stacking the bones into neat pyramids in the early sixteenth century. That tale is folklore rather than firm history. Still, for a long time the bones rested here in simple piles, waiting.

The room you see today is largely the work of one man. In 1870, a local woodcarver named František Rint was hired by the Schwarzenberg family, the aristocrats who owned the property at the time. His task was to put the bones into order. Rint did far more than tidy them. He turned them into decoration, into furniture, into art. Estimates suggest the remains of somewhere between forty thousand and seventy thousand people rest in this chapel. Let that number settle for a moment.

Now look up, at the centre of the room. The great chandelier hangs above you, made entirely of bone. It is often said to contain at least one example of every bone in the human body. Skulls hold the candle sockets. Pelvic bones, vertebrae and the small bones of hands and feet are threaded into its frame. Below it, garlands of skulls swing across the vaults like strings of flowers at a festival. The effect is strangely ordered, almost calm, rather than frightening.

Here is a detail many visitors walk straight past. On one wall, Rint signed his work, and he signed it in bone. His name, and the year 1870, are spelled out with small human bones fixed to the surface. It is a craftsman's mark, the same kind a carpenter might burn into a cabinet. Find it, and you begin to see the room differently. This was a job, done by a working man, with careful hands and a strong stomach.

Another surprise waits near the side of the chapel. Rint made the Schwarzenberg family coat of arms entirely from bones. Look closely at one corner of the shield. A bird, a raven, appears to peck at the eye of a severed head. This image refers to a story about an ancestor of the family who fought against the Ottoman Turks. It is a family emblem, rendered in the materials at hand. Here, those materials happened to be human beings.

In the corners of the chapel stand four large mounds of bones, shaped roughly like bells. These are the old stacks, the ones that existed long before Rint began his work. They give you a sense of what the ossuary looked like for centuries. Look too for the monstrance and chalices made of bone near the altar. A monstrance is the ornate holder used to display the consecrated bread in Catholic worship. Even sacred objects here are built from the dead.

It is natural to ask why anyone would make a room like this. The answer lies in an old Christian idea called memento mori, a Latin phrase meaning remember that you will die. For centuries, believers used images of skulls and bones to remind themselves that life is short and earthly wealth does not last. Kutná Hora grew rich from silver mining. Perhaps it is fitting that its most famous chapel speaks so plainly about the limits of riches.

Before you climb back into the light, stand still for a moment in the middle of the room. Notice how quiet it is, even with other visitors around you. Notice the yellow and ivory tones of the bone, and the way the candlelight shapes catch on curved skulls. When you step outside, look at the graves in the churchyard, and the trees, and the ordinary houses beyond. Every one of these people once walked through a day like yours. Walk on gently.