Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The Bone Church at Kutna Hora


One of the main attractions of Kutna Hora (a city about an hour outside of Prague) was the bone church.  Some crazy monk decided to use the remains of 40,000 people to decorate the space.  Each and every bone was cleaned and bleached.  The picture above is the crest of the Schwarzenberg Family, the family that ruled the surrounding area.  The skull on the bottom right with a bone stuck in its eye represents the Turks who were defeated in this territory by the forces of the Schwarzenberg family.

All arch ways and many parts of the walls were decorated by patterns of bones hung on strings, almost like the popcorn strings that go around Christmas trees.

This was the grand chandelier in the center of the bone church.  It contains at least one of every single bone in the human body.

Originally the church was filled with six of these "bone pyramids", today there are only four.  There are layers of what looks like leg and arm bones, skulls are used almost as a decorative piping and as the roof.  These pyramids were constructed by stacking only, they are not bound in any way.

You can look through the arches in the pyramids, its just a tad scary.

The ones that are not lit from the inside are even scarier.  This one almost looked like the skulls were riding a conveyer belt out from the depths of the darkness.

On one side of the main chapel, there was this figure of jesus looking down on you.  It looks like it was made in the same style of the claymation figures in Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

On either side of the entrance there is a massive bone chalice.  While it was appropriate timing to go visit, this bone church is not a Halloween ploy, its open all year round!

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