Sedlec Ossuary

 Author: Anna Mervine

In Kutna Hora, there is a place called the Sedlec Ossuary. People can take trips and visit the church that has over 35,000 bones in it. The exact number of bones the church has is 40,000. According to the author Michael Turtle, in an article entitled “Visiting the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora.” The bones are real, and they come from bodies that were buried in the cemetery around the church in the 14th and 15th century. After that, they were moved into the ossuary after they were dug up so the cemetery's size could be reduced. This church has been around for years, and to this day it still fascinates people enough to go out of their way to explore it.

Bone Church

You can visit the Sedlec Ossuary in Prague. The author, Stephanie Hubka, of the article “Sedlec Ossuary: Visiting the Bone Church of Kutna Hora” states that she had to take an organized tour to get there because they did not have a rental car and there is not a direct form of transportation option. “Trains and buses will extend your journey from one hour to almost three hours.” She states. Around Sedlec Ossuary, there are places you can stay if you would rather stay overnight in Kutna Hora. Unless you can get a rental, there is not a formal form of transportation, so if you visit then you would most likely be better off taking a day trip to Prague. If you want to visit, tickets are available on their website. The ossuary is open from 10AM – 6PM between April and September. The Ossuary is open from 10AM – 4PM between October and March. In the article "Czech Republic’s notorious Sedlec Ossuary to ban selfies.” it states that as of 2020 “visitors will need to ask for permission from the parish three days in advance if they wish to take pictures in the ossuary.” Meaning, unless given permission, no photography is allowed inside the building while visiting. Kutna Hora. 
The Ossuary was built during the time of the Plague. People would come to the Sedlec before their death. When they died, they would have been buried in the Sedlec. After that had stopped, the task of creating the Ossuary was given to a half blind monk named Frantisek Rindt who arranged the bones to remember the people who had died during the Plague. Now, in 2022, people can visit the Sedlec Ossuary to view the beauty of the Ossuary and have a tragically gruesome dedication to the dead. Their lives still live on and will always be remembered.

Works cited:
Turtle, Michael. “Kutna Horas Church of Bones.” Time Travel Turtle. 22 September. 2022. https://www.timetravelturtle.com/sedlec-ossuary-bone-church-kutna-hora-czech-republic/. Accessed 23 October. 2022.

Hubka, Stephanie. “Sedlec Ossuary: Visiting the Bone Church of Kutna Hora.” Road Unraveled. 20 March. 2018. https://www.roadunraveled.com/blog/bone-church-sedlec-ossuary-kutna-hora/. Accessed 24 October. 2022.

Prague, Kafkadesk. “Czech Republic’s notorious Sedlec Ossuary to ban selfies.” Kafkadesk. 22 October. 2019. https://kafkadesk.org/2019/10/22/czech-republics-notorious-sedlec-ossuary-to-ban-selfies/. Accessed 24 October. 2022.

Links for Further Reference:
So, Haley. “Sedlec Ossuary – The Creepy Church that Decorated with Thousands of Bones.” The Value. 3 Jan. 2019. https://en.thevalue.com/articles/sedlec-ossuary-church-of-bones. Accessed 25 October. 2022. This article provides information about how the Sedlec Ossuary is decorated and why it is how it is.

Tripadvisor. “Sedlec Ossuary (Kostnice Sedlec).” Viator. https://www.viator.com/Prague-attractions/Sedlec-Ossuary/overview/d462-a22657. Accessed 25 October. 2022. This article, from a trip advisor website, shares need to know information before going to the Sedlec Ossuary. Like how to get there and where you would go.

Lovejoy, Jess. “7 Amazing Facts about the Sedlec Ossuary.” Mental Floss. 27 Feb. 2019. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/575129/sedlec-ossuary-facts. Accessed 18 Oct. 2022. Jess writes an article and in every paragraph, she shares a different fact about the Sedlec Ossuary.

Catacombs of Paris

Author: Kenneth Brown

“Into the 19th century those caverns and tunnels were mined for building stone. After that farmers raised mushrooms in them, at one point producing hundreds of tons a year. During World War II, French Resistance fighters—the underground—hid in some quarries; the Germans built bunkers in others. Today the tunnels are roamed by a different clandestine group, a loose and leaderless community whose members sometimes spend days and nights below the city. They're called cataphiles, people who love the Paris underground.”

Small portions of The Paris Catacombs have been open and used to and by tourists ever since the early nineteenth century because of the danger and risk of The Paris Catacombs. Lots of people have gotten mislead in the passages and died in the Underground tunnels. It has gotten so bad that now the Paris police department was created to patrol them, to make sure that people don’t go in the unwanted areas of the cave. To this day many crazy wanderers sneak down into the unmapped and unknown sections of The Catacombs of Paris to see what they can find. 

If you look carefully in some of the areas the bones are laid in different patterns. The Leg bones are stacked high in rows covered beneath the skulls. In the other chambers pieces of legs, arms, ribs, and heads are scattered all over the floor. The Catacombs Paris consists of rooms where you must walk across a sea of skeletons in order to pass through. These piles are really deep. You cannot tell how deep these piles go or how many layers of bones lie beneath your feet.

My opinion personally I would not explore the caves because it is not safe. If you think about it you could say it’s a gamble or a risk. It is also a win lose situation. People think that it’s great to explore forbidden areas but just because something looks good doesn't mean the outcome will be great itself.  In the article it says people have gotten lost from getting off the main tour route.  It really does seem interesting though.

Work Cited Page

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=catacombs+of+paris&oq=catacombs+&gs_l=youtube.1.0.0l10.1196.3784.0.5713.10.8.0.2.2.0.191.809.3j5.8.0...0.0...1ac.1.11.youtube.YocyXtLK2YM            This site helped gives me video and media information about how the catacombs look like inside.

http://the39clues.scholastic.com/cahillweb/article/i-like-useless-facts-paris-catacombs

This Site gave me an insight of how the Catacombs of Paris were put to use.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/02/paris-underground/shea-text

Sedlec Ossuary: Church of Bones

Author: Loring Girardeau

Photo by Sony of the view outside of the Sedlec Ossuary.

The Sedlec Ossuary is a chapel that is beneath a Catholic church called the Cemetery Church of All Saints and is located in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic. It is not just an ordinary chapel, though; it is a chapel decorated in human bones. Sedlec became famous in the 13^th century when an abbot came from the holy city of Jerusalem and sprinkled some of its holy soil in the graveyard of what was, at the time, a monastery that existed before the church (“The Cemetery”). As a result, many wealthy people from around Central Europe desired to be buried in this cemetery. When the plague struck Europe, demanding many graves, the bones of the deceased began to overload the graveyard (“The Cemetery”). When the church and chapel were built in the 1400s, many of the bones were moved to the chapel beneath the church, becoming an ossuary for the town. When a noble family, known as the Schwarzenbergs, purchased the church in 1870, they hired a woodcarver, Frantisek Rint, to do something with the abandoned bones (Dunford, et al).  He then used the 40,000 bones in the chapel to create the masterpiece of the Sedlec Ossuary that sits in Kutna Hora today.

Photo from flickr of inside the Sedlec Ossuary.

Also referred to as the Church of Bones, the Sedlec Ossuary has many pieces of art made from the human bones.  There is a chandelier located in the center of the church that contains at least one of every bone in the human body (Lawson and Rufus). There are also pyramids of bones located in each corner of the chapel, made of leg bones and skulls, and there is a Schwarzenberg coat of arms, in honor of the Schwarzenberg family, that is made of pelvises, finger bones, skulls, and arm bones. Other decorations include “long streamers and festoons of ribs, vertebrae and tibias…a “fountain” of ribs gushing from a hole in the top of a cranium, or a “bird” made of a scapula and a hand” (Lawson and Rufus).

 Schwarzenberg coat of arms and the chandelier
containing every bone in the human body (Zimmer).

 According to Kevin Orlin Johnson’s Why Do Catholics Do That?, relics (parts of the body of a saint) are used to decorate sections of the church, such as the altar, as a way to honor the martyrs and keep them in the prayers of the people (204). In fact, altars of all Catholic churches must be decorated with some relics in order for the church to be considered holy (Johnson 205). In 1870 Frantisek Rint went far beyond the minimum in decorating this chapel with bones, and it has turned the chapel into one of the most spectacular ossuaries in the world.

Frantisek Rint’s signature signed in bones inside Sedlec Ossuary with pyramid of bones in background (Necromancer).

Works Cited:

Dunford, Lisa, Brett Atkinson and Neil Wilson. “Sedlec Ossuary.” Czech & Slovak Republics. Lonely Planet, 1 Apr. 2007. Web. 16 Oct. 2012.

Johnson, Kevin Orlin. “Relics.” Why Do Catholics Do That? New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. 203-207. Print.

Lawson, Kristan and Anneli Rufus. “Sedlec.” Weird Europe: A Guide to Bizarre, Macabre, and Just Plain Weird Sights. Macmillan, 12 Jun. 1999. Web. 16 Oct. 2012.

mr. nightshade. “Sedlec Ossuary (Kostnice) in Kutna Hora.” Photograph. flickr. Yahoo! Inc., 12 July 2010. Web. 26 Oct. 2012.

Necromancer. “Sedlec Ossuary, chapel of the skeletons.” Photograph. Socialphy. 25 June 2012. Web. 26 Oct. 2012.

Sony. “9. Sedlec Ossuary.” Photograph. Sony Pngst. 6 Nov. 2010. Web. 26 Oct. 2012.

“The Cemetery Church of All Saints with the Ossuary.” Kutna Hora Sedlec. 2012. Web. 26 Oct. 2012.

Zimmer, Lori. “Sedlec Ossuary.” Photograph. Inhabitat. Inhabitat.com, 29 Oct. 2011. Web. 26 Oct. 2012.

For further research:

“7 Wonders of the (Un)Dead World: Global Ossuaries”

http://weburbanist.com/2009/10/30/7-wonders-of-the-undead-world-global-ossuaries/

Describes seven ossuaries, including the Sedlec Ossuary, located throughout Europe.

“Articulating Bones: An Epilogue”

http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/15/4/465.full.pdf+html

Describes the bone art in different ossuaries and how they portray death and its meaning.

A Walk in the Ossuary in Sedlec

http://wn.com/a_walk_in_the_ossuary_in_sedlec

Contains videos and photos involving the Sedlec Ossuary.