Lovely Bones: Visiting the Sedlec Ossuary (Church of Bones)

Although the ossuary makes the concept of resting in peace look more like resting in pieces, the atmosphere is both solemn and spiritual. In fact, when many of the people whose bones now make up the decor were alive, they demanded to be interred in the chapel. The cemetery part, at least.

Sedlec Ossuary was established in the 13th century, when Henry Heidenrich, the abbot of the Sedlec Monastery, returned from a visit to the Holy Land. One of his stops had been Golgotha (the site of Christ’s crucifixion), where he collected a handful of soil. When Heidenrich scattered the sacred dirt across the monastery’s adjoining cemetery, it suddenly become the burial site de jour.

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In what may or may not have a bit of sneaky Middle Ages PR, a legend arose that anyone buried here would decompose in only three days. That was apparently a huge selling point, as no one was keen on undergoing, as the ossuary’s literature phrases it, “the lengthy process of gradual decomposition.” Everyone in Central Europe wanted a plot in holy soil where dust became dust a whole lot faster. By 1318, 30,000 skeletons occupied the Sedlec cemetery.

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The chapel became an ossuary around this time, but the Hussite Wars broke quite a few bones in 1421. In 1511, much of the graveyard was decommissioned and the silent occupants were piled in and around the ossuary. By the early 1700s, when celebrated architect Jan Blažej Santini-Aichl was engaged to restore the ossuary, tens of thousands of skeletons had taken up permanent residency.