Quite A Grand Adventure: Kutná Hora

Kutná Hora is a small city about an hour's train ride from Praha. One of the main attractions - I may dare to even say the main attraction - is the ossuary.

The ossuary is an old church building surrounded by a cemetery. The chapel in the basement of the church has been decorated (yes, decorated) with almost or over or around 40,000 bones. Human bones. Real ones. Yeah. The cemetery, which used to belong to an abbey, has been around since the 1200's. It was enlarged in the 1300's and again in the 1400's in order to accompany more burials (courtesy of the Black Death and Hussite Wars, respectively). The church was built around 1400, with upper and lower levels, the lower one intended to serve as an ossuary for the bodies disturbed and excavated during construction of the church. Sometime in the early 1500's, a half-blind monk was tasked with exhuming the bones and stacking them inside the chapel. In 1870, a woodcarver was hired to organize the heaps.

So that's the history of it. Pictures don't do it justice, but here's a shot:

base of a mound

pattern in the mound

crest

so, this is how tall the mounds are, and there are four of them

presumably the woodcarver

I don't think I've ever been so close to bones, much less human ones

tower

I didn't find out what the tradition behind or significance of leaving a coin is

chandelier. 

Oh, and local legend says that the half-blind monk who dug up and arranged the bones had his sight fully restored once he completed the task. But that's just the local legend...