The Prague Post Online: Tempo: Around Town

September 7th, 2008

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Around Town

No bones about it

February 27th, 2008 issue

OK, I admit it: When my mom said she wanted to visit me in Prague, Kutná Hora wasn’t at the top of my sightseeing list. You know, the place with the silver mines and giant cathedral and the infamous “bone church” where the skeletons of 40,000 people have been made into things like a chandelier and a coat of arms.

I knew she would like the hot springs and spa treatments at Karlovy Vary and the fairy-tale Karlštejn Castle. Maybe we could make a glass-blowing excursion and, of course, take in all of the sights that make Prague the Golden City.

But then I started polling my friends on what they thought the coolest thing would be to take a visitor to see in the Czech Republic.

Three people mentioned the ossuary.

They all sounded a little embarrassed to admit it. But everyone who’s been there told me it’s one of the most interesting things they have ever seen.

“You’ve got to ask yourself,” one friend remarked while recounting the bizarre tale of the half-blind monk supposedly tasked with collecting and stacking the bones. “Was Brother Peter sitting around one day thinking what interesting thing he could do next?”

Several folks told me the place was macabre. One warned that some visitors can’t handle walking around all of those dead people.

I was a little repulsed. But my curiosity was piqued.

Once my mom started reading the guide books, she got interested in Kutná Hora, too — but more for its other interesting monuments. She wanted to see the old silver mint, where artisans stamped coins in the Middle Ages, and the Cathedral of St. Barbara.

So off we went in a tour group van.

Our guide was full of interesting factoids, including a story about death-rocker Marilyn Manson. She said that a couple of years ago, Manson got so interested in the pyramids of bones in the ossuary that he pestered city officials to get permission to make a rock video there. They turned him down, she said.

With that disturbing thought in mind, we walked through the church cemetery and down the steps to the musty crypt crowned by a bone chandelier. It was eerie and grotesque.

As the tour guide gave her spiel, however, it all began to make sense. Many of the bones came from people who died during the Black Plague in the mid-14th century and the Hussite Wars in the early 15th century. One of the most popular places to bury them was the cemetery in Kutná Hora, where a monk had brought back holy earth from Golgotha in 1278. When religious folks decided to build a church in the middle of the cemetery around 1400, many of the graves had to be dug up, according to the tour guide. And someone, if not Brother Peter, collected and put them into piles.

In 1870, František Rint, a woodcarver, was employed by the Schwarzenberg family to put the bone heaps in order. His handiwork is still chilling — just the sort of thing that would appeal to Marilyn Manson.

After taking several pictures, my mom said she wasn’t unnerved by all the bones because she now understood the tour guide’s explanation that the church is considered a “sacred place.”

For the tour guide, the bone church is just the first stop on a full slate of stops, so we quickly moved on to St. Barbara’s and the mint, with a stop for a cup of foamy hot chocolate on the cold afternoon.

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