Sedlec Ossuary: The Church Decorated With Forty Thousand Dead

The chandelier above you is made of human bone, and not one kind of bone: it uses at least one of every bone in the body, jaws and femurs and finger joints strung into a fixture that would look almost festive if you did not know what it was. Around you, garlands of skulls loop across the vaults, a coat of arms is spelled out in vertebrae, and in one corner a man has signed his name, in bones, on the wall. This is the small chapel at Sedlec, on the edge of Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic, and everyone who steps inside goes quiet in the same way.

The reason so many dead ended up here is, oddly, a matter of real estate made holy. In 1278 the abbot of the Sedlec monastery, a man named Henry, was sent to the Holy Land and returned with a handful of soil from Golgotha, the hill of the Crucifixion, which he scattered over the abbey cemetery. That single act, according to the tradition, turned the little graveyard into one of the most desirable burial grounds in Central Europe. People wanted to be buried in earth from Jerusalem.

How the bones piled up

Demand did the rest. Waves of death filled the cemetery past capacity, above all the Black Death in the fourteenth century and the Hussite Wars in the fifteenth, and the ground could not hold everyone who wished to lie in it. As older graves were cleared to make room, the exhumed bones were stored in an ossuary, the standard medieval solution: bury, wait, disinter, stack. By some estimates the remains of forty thousand to seventy thousand people passed through. For centuries they simply sat in heaps.

The woodcarver who arranged them

The ossuary as visitors see it today is largely the work of one man in one burst of the nineteenth century. In 1870 the Schwarzenberg family, who owned the site, hired a local woodcarver named Frantisek Rint to bring order to the bones. He bleached them, and instead of merely tidying he composed: the chandelier, the skull garlands, the bell-shaped pyramids in the corners, the Schwarzenberg coat of arms rendered entirely in bone, complete with a raven picking at a skull. He also left his signature on the wall, spelled in bones and dated. What reads as a haunted crypt is, in large part, a deliberate Victorian art installation made from medieval dead.

What it is meant to say

Sedlec is a giant memento mori, the old Christian reminder that death comes for everyone and that worldly things are dust. The bones are not there to frighten so much as to instruct; the danse macabre, the medieval image of death leading rich and poor alike in a dance, is the same idea in motion. Understood that way, the chapel is less a house of horror than a very literal sermon.

The history explains the arrangement. It is quieter about the individual visitors who describe the room going cold in one spot, or the odd reluctance many feel to speak above a whisper under the chandelier. Those are impressions, not evidence. They are also the sort of thing our readers turn over.

Below, people have filed their own experiences from Sedlec and ossuaries like it, voting each True, Fake, or Not sure. Look up at the chandelier, then decide.