Not far from Prague is the town of Kutná Hora, on the outskirts of which stands the famous Kostnitsa - an unusual chapel of a Catholic church. Why is she unusual? Because its entire interior is decorated with real human bones, hence the name.
It all started back in the 13th century. Earlier, this place was the Sedlec Monastery, one of whose monks went on a pilgrimage to Bethlehem to bring some sacred land from Calvary. Upon his arrival back, the monk scattered this earth over the cemetery near the monastery to make the place sacred.
The news of this spread throughout the country and soon every believer dreamed of being buried in a small monastery cemetery.
At that time, a plague epidemic was raging and soon there were so many graves that there was no longer enough space for new burials. The cemetery turned out to be overcrowded, despite the expansion of its territory, and the monks decided to erect a kind of warehouse for bones. Remains were sent to this ossuary, which were torn out of old graves and fresh bodies were reburied in their place. Yes, at that time it was not considered godless. And there was nowhere to go.
But the mortality rate during the plague was so high that soon even the place in the ossuary ran out. And then one of the monks collected 6 large pyramids of human bones: 4 in the corners and 2 in the center of the church itself.
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In 1870, the church passed into the possession of a very wealthy Schwarzenberg family, who decided to refine the interior of the ossuary and put it in order. They hired a talented bone and wood carver Frantisek Rint and gave him complete carte blanche in the artistic ordering of his property. Frantisek did not disassemble the six pyramids of bones, once erected with difficulty by the monk, and to this day tourists can see them. He decided to bleach the bones scattered here and there in a special solution, from which he later made a huge massive chandelier, vases, garlands of skulls hanging from the walls, laid out words and dates with them, and even made the Schwarzenberg family coat of arms, in the corner of which a skull flaunts. The beak of a raven is directed to its eye socket. The skull, by the way, belongs to an enemy spy who was killed by a member of the Schwarzenberg family.
By the way, there are still rare services held in Kostnitsa, which everyone can attend.