How many skeletons can fit inside one room? This is not a macabre riddle, though it may actually sound like one. It is, in fact, the question one instinctively ends up asking when faced with the chilling, yet strangely fascinating, decor in Sedlec Ossuary, a small Roman Catholic chapel in the Czech Republic.

The walls

Known as the Church of Bones, this underground vault located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints, is an astonishingly bizarre testament to the powers of creativity, not to mention being a morbid spectacle attracting over 200,000 tourists every year.

The ossuary itself, although a World Heritage Site, is very inconspicuous from the outside. Apart from the fact, of course, that it is found at the back of a very small cemetery in the suburb of Sedlec.

The very first thing one immediately notices as one ascends the four steps from the sunny street into the dark, incense-filled chapel, is the enormous eight-foot chandelier made out of bones which hangs, immense and forbidding, in the middle of the ossuary and directly in the immediate line of vision of anyone walking over its threshold.

Grimly intriguing, the chandelier, made out of all the different bones in the human body, hovers over the awe-struck visitors with its guttering candles glowing from gleaming white skulls, staring down at all who dare to enter, like a spider ready to fall on its prey. As the grouchy attendant at the entrance ticket booth shushed our awed comments and we started to step into the chapel proper, our gazes locked onto a veritable mound of skulls and what looked like hipbones, arranged artistically behind a locked wire mesh on our left.

Actually, I must admit that at this point we hardly knew where to look. Every nook and cranny of the ceiling and walls was cramm­ed with artistically arranged skulls, femur bones, tibias, arm bones and other unnameable fragments of the human body.

Bizarre testament to the powers of creativity

Hanging precariously from hooks, ropes, twine, affixed by any means possible to create a display both impressive and disturbing. The ossuary also displays two large bone chalices, four baroque bone candelabras, enormous bone pyramids, skull candleholders and many other carefully structured arrangements. Looping chains of bones hang across all the arches like crepe paper at a birthday party, adorning the gothic architecture chillingly.

The Schwarzenberg coat of arms

How did such a place come about? What could have prompted anyone to bleach and preserve the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people and adorn a chapel with them? It all began in 1278 when the King of Bohemia sent the abbot of the Sedlec Cistercian Monastery on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When he came back, the abbot brought back with him a jar of ‘holy soil’ from the Golgotha, and since this was considered to be a holy relic, many people at the time started to express the wish to be buried near it, at the Sedlec cemetery. When the black plague ravaged Europe in the 14th century, tens of thousands of victims were added to the plots. The Crusades then resulted in even more thousands being laid to rest in this particular cemetery, as did other burials which followed over time. The cemetery had to be expanded and the Gothic chapel was later built near it during the 15th century.

Chalice of Bones

Skeletal remains started to be exhumed and stored in the basement of the chapel to make room for all the newly deceased, resulting in haphazard piles and mounds of skeletons. Everything was left undisturbed until in 1870 a local woodcarver, František Rint, was employed to place the bones in order. The result was unique and impressively shocking.

It was Rint who was responsible for disinfecting the bones and bleaching them with chlorinated lime to give them a uniform ap­pearance. He also created the Bone Church’s stunning chandelier, not to mention constructing the breathtaking, huge Schwar­zenberg coat of arms, in honour of the aristocratic family of landowners who funded the initiative. It includes a raven pecking at the severed head of a Turk – all made of human bone. Rint’s own signature, also executed in bone, appears on the wall near the en­trance to the chapel.

The Bone Church is located more or less in the middle of the Czech Republic, and the closest international airport is the one in Prague. Although the small, jaw-dropping chapel might be considered to be gruesome and disturbing by some, I found it to be not only peaceful but also a prefect representation of the ephemeral, yet precious quality of human existence. It has a different impact on each individual, depending on the person. However, I can say with absolute certainty that it is definitely a worthwhile experience for anyone visiting the area.