The history of Kutna Hora

Holy soil turned a cemetery into a mass grave

The Sedlec Ossuary is a small Catholic chapel under the Church of All Saints, in Sedlec, now a suburb of Kutná Hora. It holds the bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, stacked and shaped into decorations.

The story starts with dirt. In 1278, Abbot Henry of the Cistercian monastery at Sedlec traveled to the Holy Land for King Ottokar II of Bohemia. Abbot Henry came home with a handful of soil from Golgotha, the hill where Jesus was crucified, and scattered it over the abbey cemetery. Word spread that the ground was now holy. People across Central Europe wanted to be buried in it.

The cemetery's reputation turned deadly in scale. Famine struck in 1318 and killed roughly 30,000 people, who were buried at Sedlec. Thirty years later the Black Death arrived. Archaeologists working at the site through 2025 have found 1,861 burials, including 33 mass graves, one of them stacked 26 bodies deep. More than a third of the dead in those graves were children.

The cemetery grew to cover 3.5 hectares, close to nine acres, and held around 40,000 graves by the end of the 15th century. It became one of the largest burial grounds in medieval Europe. Around 1400, monks built a small Gothic church in the middle of it, with two floors: a chapel above, and a lower room meant to hold bones cleared from the overcrowded graves outside.

The lower room would not stay empty, or orderly, for long.

Hussite soldiers burned the newly built bone chapel

In 1421, Hussite soldiers stormed Kutná Hora during their religious wars against the Catholic Church. The Hussite soldiers set fire to the cemetery chapel, gutting the building the monks had only recently finished. The fire damaged the structure badly enough that it would stand in poor repair for nearly three centuries.

After 1511, legend says the task of sorting the exhumed bones fell to a half-blind monk of the Cistercian order. He is said to have stacked skulls and femurs into six great pyramids inside the lower chapel. The story told around Kutná Hora claims he regained his sight once the work was done, a reward for pious labor among the dead. A source from a century earlier suggests bones had already been arranged there for close to two hundred years.

Santini braced a leaning chapel with new stonework

By the early 1700s, the chapel was leaning. It had been built on soft, unstable ground, and the front wall was pulling outward. Abbot Snopka, who ran the monastery at the time, hired the architect Jan Santini Aichel to fix it.

Santini Aichel was a small man, partly lame, the son of an Italian stonemason's family settled in Prague. He built a new entrance to brace the sagging wall and rebuilt the upper chapel in a style historians call Baroque Gothic, blending pointed medieval arches with Baroque flourish. He is also credited with the first bone decorations conceived as art rather than storage, arranging skulls into shapes meant to suggest sacred mountains.

In 1784, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II dissolved monasteries across his lands, and Sedlec's Cistercian house went with them. The property passed to the Schwarzenberg family, one of Bohemia's great noble houses. They took over the ossuary as its patrons and would soon give it the look it has today.

A woodcarver built chandeliers from forty thousand bones

In 1867, the Schwarzenbergs hired a woodcarver named František Rint, from the town of Česká Skalice, to bring order to the bone heaps. Rint spent three years on the job, working with his wife and two children. They soaked roughly 40,000 bones in buckets of chlorinated lime to bleach and clean them.

What Rint built by 1870 is what visitors to Sedlec see now. Four bell-shaped mounds of bones fill the chapel's corners. A chandelier hangs from the center of the nave, built from at least one example of every bone in the human body. Garlands of skulls drape the stone ceiling. Rint shaped a coat of arms for the Schwarzenberg family entirely out of bone, including a raven pecking at a severed head, a detail from the family's actual crest. Near the entrance, he signed his name on the wall, also in bone.

A banned film and new digs kept uncovering graves

In 1970, on the hundredth anniversary of Rint's work, Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer shot a short film inside the ossuary. It paired rapid, unsettling cuts of skulls and bones with a calm tour guide's voice reading the standard script. Communist censors banned it for years, suspecting it mocked the state. The original narration was eventually restored.

Archaeological work beside the chapel has continued into the 2020s. Digs between 2016 and 2023 confirmed 32 of the mass graves first suspected under the cemetery, most dating to the 14th and 15th centuries, part of the same burial ground that filled the ossuary above it. Restoration of the chapel itself, begun in 2014, is expected to run until at least 2030, repairing the stonework and the bone displays together.

The ossuary now draws more than 200,000 visitors a year, among the most visited sites in the country. The bones of Sedlec's plague dead, famine dead, and war dead still hang from its ceiling, arranged by a 19th-century woodcarver into chandeliers and coats of arms, over ground an abbot once called holy with a handful of dirt from Jerusalem.