Sedlec Ossuary 💀

Welcome to Kutna Hora, just outside Prague which is home to the famous bone church. The gothic church of All Saints lacks the traditional austerity of Cistercian buildings. With its architectural elegance it can be ranked amongst the remarkable monuments of the so called ‘beautiful style’ that developed in Bohemia around 1400.

This fabulous building featured Sedlec cemetery's importace based on the fact that the area was sprinkled with earth from Golgotha. There is no documentation of the date of the foundation of the church so we can only suppose that it was in either the early or late 14th century.

A typological classification would label it as a gothic carner, a storeyed building compound of an upper chapel and lower ossuary. The ground plan is quadratic, made of carefully hewn stones, which have never been plastered. The very impressive western front is equipped with two polygonal towers where the eternal light of the dead used to burn.

The cemetery was founded in the middle of the 13th century. It became famous under the rule of Premysl Otakar II, during which time abbot Heidenreich brought here the sacred soil of Golgotha. This had been dispersed over the area of the cemetery. Moreover, a legend rose which claimed that a corpse buried in this earth would decompose within three days, and then just blanched bones would remain. This legend, which promised avoiding the lengthy process of gradual decomposition, caused even higher interest in burial therein.