The story of Sedlec Ossuary

Beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints lies one of the strangest chapels in Europe, decorated with the bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 people. The story begins in 1278, when the abbot of Sedlec, Henry, returned from the Holy Land with a little earth from Golgotha and sprinkled it over the abbey cemetery.

Word spread, and people across Central Europe wanted to be buried here. After the Black Death and the Hussite Wars the cemetery overflowed, and around 1400 a church was built with a lower chapel to hold the bones dug up from mass graves.

In 1870 the Schwarzenberg family hired the woodcarver František Rint to put the heaps in order. Look up at the chandelier, said to contain at least one of every bone in the human body, then find the Schwarzenberg coat of arms and Rint's signature, both made of bone.