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Czech Republic: Kutna Hora bone church
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One of the many structures at the Bone Church in Kutna Hora
Kutna Hora was a very important silver mining town in the Czech Republic, but was significant for many other reasons. The first thing I saw when we got to Kutna Hora was the Bone Church, the real name of which is, I believe, Kostnice Ossuary.
The site of the church was a very sought-after burial space because an abbot in the 13th century came back from his travels with some soil from Palestine and sprinkled it on the burial grounds, which led many people to believe the land was part of the Holy Land. So, lots of people wanted to be buried there. But after the 17th century, during which the 30 Years War happened as well as several plagues, there were too many bodies being buried there, so the old bodies were exhumed to make way for new bodies.
Originally, after the bodies were exhumed they were just tossed into a pile in an extra building. This was apparently a pretty common thing to happen in this time. As our tour guide said, this never happens in the Jewish faith because after burial, you can’t un-bury a body. Catholicism, surprisingly, says no such thing.
So, the piles of bodies got bigger and bigger in this particular space until it was nearly impossible to deal with. In the late 1800’s, a gentleman was commissioned to rearrange and redesign the church. He ended up starting the trend of making beautiful designs and sculptures out of bones. Now, there are the bones of about 40,000 people used in the decoration of this church. Every single bone in the human body is used in the creation of the bone chandelier.
My favorite? The coat of arms. The skull featured in the bottom right is the skull of a Turk- the Turks invaded the area and the person doing the coat of arms wanted to depict their dislike of the Turks. So he made a depiction of a raven poking out the eye of a Turk skull. Out of bones. Pretty cool.
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