First things first: what is an ossuary?
Ossuary:
A container or room into which the bones of dead people are placed
Generally used when burial space is scarce, they can hold more remains than a typical coffin or tomb. In this case, a LOT more remains.
Sedlec ossuary can be found in Kutná Hora, about an hour outside of Prague, and is one of the Czech Republic’s most visited attractions.
I can see how this might sound strange and uninteresting; I mean, who wants to see a box or room full of bones? But what makes this particular ossuary really (morbidly) interesting is the sheer volume of remains and the macabre yet artistic way they’ve been displayed.
The sedlec ossuary houses an estimated 40 to 70 thousand skeletons. That’s a population of well over twice that of my hometown. So imagine, if you will, 50,000 coffins piled high in a small stone church. Probably wouldn’t work so well. Of course, it didn’t start out like this. Let’s go back a few hundred years:
In the late 13th century, a diplomat sent to Jerusalem returned with a handful of earth from the Holy Land, which he sprinkled on the grounds of the cemetery at Sedlec. After word spread, Sedlec became the place to be buried, among Europe’s upper class. It was a pretty small cemetery, so naturally the space was coveted. This was all well and good until the early 1300s, which brought with it the… plague. (Please go ahead and say that to yourself in an appropriately menacing voice)
All of a sudden, in a very short time, there was a very large surplus of bodies, and nowhere else for them to go. It took around 100 years before the church was built in the cemetery (along with space to house bones from abolished graves), and another century more before someone was actually assigned the task of exhuming skeletons and stacking their bones. Presumably people were tasked with it at various times in the intervening years, but, as with everything else, I assume it kept being put off. Not that I can blame them, it doesn’t sound like a very pleasant job. Regardless, none of those people were documented, or at least not documented very well.
The task eventually fell to a half blind monk in the early 1500s. It was another 300+ years before the bones were fashioned into the art you can see now: candelabra, instruments, a coat of arms, etc.
In 1870 a wood-carver named Rint was commissioned with putting the stacks of bones in a slightly more orderly fashion. My guess is they weren’t quite expecting what he came up with. In addition to the literal piles of skulls that can be found at various points around the room, one of the main features is a candelabra that is made up of every bone in the human body. He also signed his name in bones. Classy
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Recycling on steroids…