the ground at the Sedlec Ossuary at Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic was "holy" because a Monk in the late 13th century went to the holy land and brought back a bucket of dirt from Golgotha and scattered it over the graveyard there. idk about rotting fast, never heard about that, but yeah.... word got around and it became Central Europe's destination burial spot. Everyone wanted their bones and their moms bones and there uncle's bone etc buried there, which because of the plague and the Hussite Wars, meant LOTS of ppl were hauling their relative's bone to central Bohemia, upwards of 40,000.
Transporting a whole ass body back then was expensive and so most ppl would only bring a femur or a skull, Hence the big ass hut looking thing behind the crest pictured above. That's nothing but femur on top of femur on top of femur with some skulls added in for spice. And they have 4 FOUR of those suckers iirc.
here's a look inside of one
The Chapel wasn't built until over 100 years later and the bones exhumed at the time of construction and stored inside because.... well what else were they gonna do with them. It was only about 150 years ago that the piles of bones got fancy tho. the family whose crest is depicted above paid some woodcarver to make the sculptures and bone mounds because rich Czech ppl in the 19th century were gothic af.
when I was there in 2016 they were in the process of trying to fix the Chapel, because the foundation was sinking or something idr, point was there was an issue with the foundation. This was problematic because the bone huts and really all the other bone sculptures were so fragile that if they tried to move them they would have crumbled completely. Also even tho there were tons of bones inside the ossuary there were still and incredible amount of bones still buried in the graveyard outside.
Any and all construction was very slow going. Cause as you can see
I believe they closed for a while the following year and are back open again, but I don't want to think about what they had to do to make sure the bones didn't just turn to dust during construction.
But yeah,one of the wildest places I've ever been. Now I just need to visit the Czech hell hole and I will have seen everything I want to see while living here.
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