I just want to take a minute to talk about this unreal place that is never spoken of, but was one of the most beautiful, eerie, and odd places over ever visited.
-This is the Sedlec ossuary in the little town of Kutná Hora, just about an hour train outside of Prague. Over 40,000-70,000 skeletons have been arranged as chandeliers, coats of arms, pyramids.... 40,000-70,000 people are now ornamentations.
-But how did they end up with this uneasy amount of skeletons? During the 14th century, if you remember your socials class, is when the Black Death hit Europe, alongside the Hussite wars. But why did soooo many people chose Sedlec to be buried at? Because in the 13th century, the Abbot of Sedlec, Abbot Henry, brought a handful of earth back from the Grave of the Lord in Jerusalem and scattered it around the grounds. This holy soil made this is “must go to place” when it was your time to be buried.
-In 1870 though it got to be too much, the bodies were simply piling higher and higher in the chapel and no one really knew what to do with them. Until a local carpenter, František Rint, offered to “re-organize” the bones for them. and the results are as seen.
Because I’ve spent so much time around bones (as an Anthropology Student. not just as a weirdo), I got to see so much more than just how the bones were arranged, I got to see that because of the massive mastoid process, pronounced nuchal crest, squared chin, sloped forehead, squared orbits with dull supraorbital ridges that this one was likely a male, perhaps a father, but certainly a son. I saw war wounds on some of the skulls that had healed and that somehow many of these individuals had lived with literal holes in their heads. I saw the skulls of children and mothers and fathers, delicately hung from a chandelier.
-It was a very conflicting experience. Because on one hand I was in awe, but it was also unbelievably disrespectful and ethically immoral that A) the deceased were arranged into common art without consent and B ) that the tourists were allowed to walk through, laugh, take photos, selfies. and even touch the skulls. Technically that wasn’t allowed but none of the bones were behind any sort of barrier and many of them were shiny from being rubbed. like some sort of good luck charm.
As soon as the flesh is gone people tend to forget the humanity that once embodied that skeleton, and I think that it’s important, when visiting a place such a this, to remind yourself of that.
