The Ossuary Chapel, perhaps better known as the Bone Church.
Kuntá Hora is a small Czech town to the south of Prague. There’s not too much going on there, in fact it remained completely dormant on the sunny Saturday when we visited. An odd combination of trucking bays, abandoned industrial and residential buildings, and a few old churches populate the majority of the city. Here you’ll find the Bone Church, also known as the Ossuary Chapel.
The Ossuary Chapel made the trip completely worthwhile. What would have been otherwise a very small, uninteresting chapel, sat decorated in the skeletons of 40,000 human beings. Originally, 6 human pyramids decorated the interior as freestanding structures lacking any concrete or glue to hold them together. Four remain today in addition to a coat of arms made of bones and a chandelier composed of every bone in the human body. The chandelier hangs just over the entrance to the crypt of the 18 wealthiest aristocrats of the 1700’s who had inhabited the town. Overall, the entire place gives off a very Indiana Jones-Temple of Doom type feeling.
Whose bones decorate the altars here? The corpses, victims of the plague, were unearthed from a mass grave/crypt on the site of the church and bleached before they were placed on the walls. Whoever held the job of extracting decaying bodies from the soil surrounding the church definitely caught the short end of the stick here, but the end product has resulted in quite the unique little cathedral.
