Kostnice Ossuary: The Bone Church

Kutna Hora/Prague

I grew up in Los Angeles. Maybe it was that proximity to Sabato Rodia’s famous Watts Towers, or just coming from a country where it’s pretty accepted that a lone eccentric might build their own monument from what’s at hand (think Stanley Marsh II’s Cadillac Ranch, where 10 Cadillacs are half-buried nose down in the Texas desert, or Leonard Knight’s colorful shrine to the message “God Is Love,” Salvation Mountain), but the idea to travel a little out of my way (even sometimes to what feels like the absolute middle of nowhere) to see the realization of one person’s, sometimes unconventional, artistic vision is something I’m usually on board with.

In the case of the Kostnice Ossuary, also known quite simply as The Bone Church, “out of your way” is a one-hour train ride from Prague’s main station, and “what was at hand” for wood carver Frantisek Rint in the late 19^th Century were the bones of some 40,000 14^th Century plague victims that had been moved from their graves to the ossuary to make room for new burials. Who knows what the Schwarzenberg family had in mind when they employed Rint to imaginatively arrange those bones, but the resulting works form a monumental Memento mori. Particularly impressive are the central chandelier, composed of at least one of every bone from the human body, and the Schwarzenberg family coat of arms remade, of course, entirely of bones. Perhaps not to everyone’s taste, but if the idea of standing in a room with 40,000 skulls doesn’t give you the creeps, leave the usual sights of Prague to everyone else for a day and jump on a train to Kutna Hora.

Zamecka 127, 284 03 Kutna Hora-Sedlec, Czech Republic. The church is located a 900-meter walk from the Kutna Hora main train station. Connections run from the Prague main station approximately every hour.

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