BoingBoing reader Alex says,
Sedlec is a small suburb of Kutna Hora, which you can get to in about an hour on the train from Prague. Just off the main road into Kutna Hora, there's a small chapel, set in a very green graveyard. There is a statue of a Saint outside, with a halo of stars made from gold metal. There's a low-key, local restaurant opposite. The church-yard is quiet. The church itself has spires, and at the top are skull and crossbone motifs.
Sedlec is not actually a church – it's an Ossuary: a tomb. Inside, it contains the remains of about 40,000 people. They have been used to decorate the building: their skulls cover the walls, their limbs hang from the ceiling as a massive chandelier and their bones form a huge coat of arms on one wall. I spent an afternoon in the place and have loads of creepy photos up on my site.
Update: Reader Lucas Emery says, "I was excited to see your post about the Kostnice bone ossuary. I first heard of it in a Smithsonian magazine article when I was in, like, the eighth grade and over the spring I was lucky enough to finally get to see it up close and personal! I've got a few cc licensed pictures up on flickr for the curious. My next dream travel destination is the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo. Spooky!" Link.
Reader Darren Barefoot says,
"Here are two photos I took when visiting that creepy place last winter: Link, and Link 2. The latter one won me a free point-and-shoot camera from Backpacker magazine.
Another interesting note about the ossuary is that if you want to take photos, you have to pay an additional fee. This is presumably to mitigate the postcard and poster revenue lost from their tiny giftshop. The fee, in my recollection, was nominal. I figured it was a reasonable compromise approach to the thorny issue of photography in tourist attractions. If you should find yourself in Kutna Hora (a small town near Sedlec), don't miss Church of St. Barbara. It's my favourite European catheral."
