Sedlec Ossuary

The cemetery beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Sedlec became one of the most sought-after burial grounds in Central Europe after 1278, when the abbot of the local Cistercian monastery returned from the Holy Land and scattered soil he had brought from Golgotha across the grounds. The Black Death in the mid-14th century and the Hussite Wars of the early 15th century filled the cemetery with tens of thousands of additional burials, and a Gothic church with a bone-storage chapel in its lower level was built to accommodate the remains exhumed to make room for new graves.

In 1870, the Schwarzenberg family, who owned the property, commissioned local woodcarver František Rint to bring order to the chapel's bone piles. Rint bleached and arranged the bones — by some estimates the remains of 40,000 to 70,000 individuals — into elaborate decorations, including four enormous bell-shaped mounds in the corners of the chapel, garlands of skulls strung along the ceiling, a coat of arms of the Schwarzenberg family rendered in bone, and a central chandelier that incorporates at least one of every bone in the human body. Rint signed his work in bone on the chapel wall. The ossuary remains consecrated and receives both religious visitors and a large volume of tourists drawn by its singular appearance.