Sedlec Ossuary

About Sedlec Ossuary

The Sedlec cemetery accumulated plague and Hussite war victims from the 14th century onward after a 1278 consecration gave it extraordinary sacred status. Bones were moved to the ossuary in the 15th century; the Schwarzenberg family commissioned František Rint to formalize the decoration in 1870.

Overview The Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora is a small Catholic chapel whose interior is decorated with the bones of an estimated 40,000 to 70,000 people — arranged into chandeliers, garlands, coats of arms, and architectural ornaments covering the walls, vaulted ceiling, and four corner chapels. The work was commissioned in 1870 from woodcarver František Rint, who spent years arranging the accumulated bones of medieval plague and Hussite war victims into the decorative program that now draws visitors from across the world.

The Story Behind It The Sedlec cemetery became one of the most desirable burial sites in Central Europe in 1278 when a Cistercian abbot returned from Jerusalem carrying a small amount of earth from Golgotha and scattered it over the grounds — a consecration that gave the site a unique sacred status. By the fifteenth century, after the Black Death and the Hussite wars, the cemetery held tens of thousands of remains that the Cistercians had no space to reinter. Bones were moved into the ossuary chapel below the Church of All Saints and arranged by a half-blind monk into basic pyramidal structures. In 1870, the Schwarzenberg family — owners of much of Kutná Hora's surrounding land — hired Rint to make something coherent from the accumulation. Rint signed his work in bones in the entry staircase.

What You'll Experience The space is small — the chapel fits a few dozen visitors — and the effect of the bone interior requires adjustment. The chandelier above the nave contains at least one of every bone in the human body. The Schwarzenberg coat of arms in the right corner shows a skeleton's hand picking a crow's eye from the bird's skull — a reference to a family legend that required a woodcarver working in human remains to find appropriately dark humor. Kutná Hora itself, a UNESCO World Heritage city, has St. Barbara's Church and other silver-mining heritage worth combining with the ossuary visit.

Getting There Kutná Hora is 70 kilometers east of Prague, accessible by train from Praha Hlavní nádraží (1 hour) or by organized day tour. The ossuary is in the Sedlec suburb, a 10-minute walk from Kutná Hora-Sedlec train station.

The Experience

A small chapel whose every surface — vaults, walls, chandeliers, corner chapels — is composed of human bones arranged into architectural and heraldic ornament, including a chandelier containing at least one of every bone in the human body.

Why It Matters

The Sedlec Ossuary is the most elaborate surviving example of ossuary art in Europe and a documentation of both medieval attitudes toward death and the specific Black Death and Hussite war mortality that filled the Sedlec cemetery.

Why Visit

The experience of standing inside a space decorated with tens of thousands of actual human remains — competently arranged rather than grimly piled — is genuinely unlike any other interior in the world. The dark humor of the Schwarzenberg coat of arms repays close looking.