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Bony story of Kutna Hora draws the curious Posted
August 2, 2004
By DEBORAH BLOCK KUTNA HORA, Czech Republic— It was a much-needed vacation day and four 86 kč ($1.84) round-trip tickets that put my co-worker, our boss and her boyfriend on a train to Kutna Hora. We left a little past 10 a.m. from Prague’s Hlavní Nádraží train station and arrived an hour later. We walked about 10 minutes to our main destination— a small church in Sedlec, the next town over.
The church now known as “the bone church” and was built as Assumption of the Virgin Mary Cathedral between 1280 and 1320 after a discovery of silver in Sedlec that also inspired the settlement of Kutna Hora. Soon thereafter, an abbot took a trip to Jerusalem and brought back earth from Golgotha, which he sprinkled on the church’s cemetery, making it famous. Many wealthy citizens of Sedlec and Kutna Hora desired to be buried in the church cemetery, which was enlarged in the 14th Century to accommodate the mass numbers of bodies from the epidemic plague and the Hussite wars in the 15th Century. More than 40,000 people were buried here. When parts of the cemetery were demolished, there were an excess of human bones lying around. A half-blind Cistercian monk stacked these bones around the church and, when he ran out of room, started putting them inside. Between 1703 and 1710, the ossuary that was set on fire by the Hussites three centuries earlier was rebuilt in the baroque style it is today. To decorate the church, the architect used the bones as well as crowns and candelabras.
The bone-made decorations are elaborate and include strings of sculls that look like popcorn strung around a Christmas tree, a chandelier made out of every human bone possible and a coat of arms that features a bone-made sparrow poking someone’s eye out. The architect also signed his name on the wall by the entry to the ossuary in bone letters. There are several pyramids made of sculls and cross bones that “represent multitudes which none can count facing God’s throne,” according to the information sheet the church offers in more than two dozen languages. Admission into the bone church is 20 kč for students and 35 kč for adults. It also costs an additional 30 kč to take photos and 60 kč to take video. It is not big enough to stay for more than half an hour, but it is well worth it to see how beautiful human bones can be.
After leaving the church, we walked into Kutna Hora. It was a 30-minute journey by foot, including a stop we made at a wall symbolizing the arrival of the Red Army. The town itself is quaint and moderately touristy. We stopped at a small restaurant atop a hill to rest and drink cheap pivo (Czech beer). An hour later, we walked back towards the Cathedral of St. Barbara. To get there we had to cross the “Charles ledge”—an imitation of one side of Prague’s Charles Bridge that juts out from the side of the hill. Inside the cathedral were painted glass windows and art from the 15th Century, including one painting of a nightmare that featured what my boss called “an evil elephant” and what her boyfriend called “a poorly rendered lion.”
At the top of the 30-meter high ceiling were four statues, representing four virtues—Justice, Bravery, Caution and Balance. Outside the cathedral is a tower from which you can see the town below, including the leaning clock tower. We went for lunch at an outdoor restaurant with reasonably priced food where we could people watch and decide on what to do next. We were torn between the coal mining museum and the alchemy museum, but decided on the former. Arriving at the coal mining museum, we changed our minds and headed to the alchemy museum, which is only a few years old. When we got there it was 20 minutes before five, and the museum was about to close. So, we hopped in a taxi and took it back to Kutna Hora’s Hlavní Nádraží to head back to Prague so we could show our friends our pictures of bones.
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