Hey there my Hive friends and followers!
I´m really glad that I managed to find some time to prepare another post about our recent trip to Kutna Hora. After showing you the majestic St. Barbara Church here on my blog last week, I´m going to introduce you to another very popular landmark of this amazing historical town and that´s the Sedlec Ossuary.
Ossuaries are special sites that can come in a variety of forms but they all have the same function - to hold skulls and bones of dead people, which is why visiting them is sometimes considered a form of the so called "dark tourism" (hence the title of this post).
Let´s start out with a bit of history of this eerie place though. The Sedlec Ossuary is a part of the All Saints Church that is located in the Kutna Hora neighborhood of Sedlec. Originally, the church was a part of a large Cistercian Monastery that was founded on that site in the 12th century. These days, the church consists of two chapels. The upper one looks like a regular chapel and is accessible to the public for free. The lower chapel houses the ossuary.
I really wanted to go inside the ossuary (despite the not exactly cheap entrance fee) to take some photos of it for you guys but to my unpleasant surprise, as I found out on the spot, photographing is strictly prohibited in the ossuary so I decided not to go there. Therefore, the pictures that you will see in this post will only feature those parts of the church and the adjacent cemetery where taking photos was allowed.
Let me start with a picture that actually doesn´t even come from the church complex but it´s clearly related to it and I find it really cool and suitable to serve as the cover shot for this post so here we go... Skull statues that can be found in front of the St. Barbara Church.
And this is already the entrance to the St. All Saints Church with the ossuary.
A couple of shots of the church and the cemetery that surrounds it.
This is the upper chapel.
A few images depicting some of the bones in the ossuary that I managed to click from the upper chapel and from the main door.
Informative sign showing some of the bone decorations that are no longer a part of the ossuary.
I know it´s kind of weird to have a post about something without the photos of the most interesting part of it but I don´t want to use other people´s photos here (I think it´s not even allowed in the Photography Lovers community that I submitted this post into) so I just decided to add a few links here where you can find some cool actual pictures of the Sedlec Ossuary. I guess they were taken when it was still allowed...
Sedlec Ossuary from delveintoeurope.com
Sedlec Ossuary from worldatlas.com
Sedlec Ossuary from outdoortipy.cz
I hope you got some idea after checking out the links. From what I found on the internet, the Sedlec Ossuary is home to skulls and bones of approximately 60,000 dead people. As you could see, many of those skeletons were used as decoration of the ossuary.
We visited the place on a beautiful sunny summer day and it still gave me the creeps so I can only imagine what it feels like to be in the ossuary or on the cemetery at night or on a dark foggy autumn day... Definitely qualifies as a dark tourism site if you ask me :)
To find out the exact location of the Sedlec Ossuary, feel free to check out the Pinmapple, I pinned it there ;)
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