Kostnice v Sedlci

I was dying to come visit this place for years and finally did. I expected it to be more of a bigger attraction. It was good to finally see it in person though. If you are Gothic or into macabre stuff, this is your spot. It is a small temple in a cemetery which makes it more spooky. Inside you’ll see some fine craftsmanship of some 40,000 plus human bones. It is Christian in origin and I believe they still have services here. It looks like a place where vampires might live in. Take a visit yourself, it is quite impressive. Kutná Hora is also an ancient medieval mining town which will take you way back in time… awesome.

Would love to have gone, but will no longer be able to go because of the discriminatory treatment of a young goth woman. It’s not ok to discriminate against someone based on their appearance.
She and her friend were initially denied entry because the staff thought they would try to perform some sort of «satanic rite or ritual,» after which they had to be blessed to enter and were not allowed to take photos.
This is a shame, that they cannot treat all tourists equally especially ones to whom the space is sacred.

This is quite a sight. Took a trip here from Prague. It’s very awe-​inspiring and beautiful in a morbid, memento mori way. The craftsmanship is incredible.
Just fyi — this is a very short visit. I read reviews where people said not to expect to spend over an hour here. We spent 10 minutes here. It’s a small basement. We didn’t do the audio tour (although I read that it was very brief).
We were initially going to book a tour to Kutna Hora where a bus picks you up from your hotel and takes you to the bone church as well as a larger church. We waited until the last minute and they were all booked. So if you want to do that — I’d recommend booking days in advance — they have stands in the main squares (believe it’s called Martin Tours). You can also ask at your hotel’s front desk.
So we ended up taking a train. Took us several hours for a 10 minute church visit. I was surprised at how confusing the train system was. There are several Kutna Hora stops and I referred to an incorrect Trip Advisor review so we bought tickets for the wrong stop. We had to transfer once on the way there and twice on the way back. In retrospect, I would absolutely try to book the tour and avoid public transport altogether. So if you want to avoid the stress of trying to figure things out and transferring trains, book the tour, early!

We took the express train to Kutna Hora from Prague. We walked from the train. There is a bus but it was only a couple blocks to the information building. You can buy tickets there – for one, three or four places. We chose the three and that was enough to spend the whole day in Kutna Hora.
We started at the Church of the Assumption of Our Lady and Saint John the Baptist, then went to Sedlec Ossuary. After lunch we went on to St. Barbara’s by bus on the main road. You can get a small train from downtown to the main train to take it back to Prague. The small train is included in the price.
This place is a work of art. Truly amazing. I was amazed by how well it was done – how beautiful it is… But most of my family was overwhelmed by the feeling that these people’s souls were still here, thousands of them butchered in a war or dying from a terrible disease.
In 1278, Henry, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Sedlec, was sent to the Holy Land by King Otakar II of Bohemia. He returned with a small amount of earth he removed from Golgotha and sprinkled it over the abbey cemetery. The word of this pious act soon spread and the cemetery in Sedlec became a desirable burial site throughout Central Europe. In the mid 14^th century, during the Black Death and after the Hussite Wars in the early 15^th century, thousands were buried in the cemetery, so it had to be enlarged.
Around 1400, a Gothic church was built in the cemetery with a lower chapel to be used as an ossuary for the mass graves unearthed during construction and to make room for new burials. After 1511, the task of exhuming skeletons and stacking their bones in the chapel was given to a half-​blind monk of the order. In 1870, František Rint, a woodcarver, was employed to put the bone heaps into order, yielding this result.

The Sedlec Ossuary is worth a trip, just don’t expect to spend more than 1 hour in the church. I did a lot of online research on how best to get there, hours etc… It ended up being quite easy. Check their website for hours and price, but it isn’t expensive.
We took the train from Prague to Kutná Hora. Take the express train, the others stop too often. You’ll know when to get off because all the tourists get off the train there :) It’s just under an hour from Prague via train. Once you arrive, there are two options. You can take a bus or van to the Ossuary or walk. My suggestion is to walk. It doesn’t take more than 10 – 15 minutes to walk there, and if it’s a nice day, it’s a flat easy walk. It’s well sign posted and there is a big map in a few places.
The Ossuary and its grounds is a quick tour but there are several places to grab lunch around it. The Ossuary itself is small. You have to go down a flight of stairs into the chamber and you can view the crazy bones that make up everything. You can take all the photos you want and people certainly do! It does feel a bit like a Disney Bone church because of the numerous tourists and the ticket desk location, inside the church. I wish the ticket desk and mini-​store were located outside the sanctuary.
If you are interested, then go. It’s a nice day trip. Check out the train schedules and plan your trip there and back.

It’s an interesting place. Make sure to stop here on your way to the main sights in Kutna Hora. It only takes about 10 minutes to visit.

I am so happy I made it to Sedlec Ossuary!
You have to see this place for yourself. Personally I like macabre shit so this was right up my alley. Lots of history in this tiny chapel. It is beautiful in a weird way. I expected to get a bad vibe but it is a very peaceful place. They actually still have two services there which are held on the day of the dead November 1 & 2. If you’re curious go check it out. It’s a bit if an adventure.

So, we made the mistake of taking the bus from Prague into Kutna Hora and were plopped a good 45 minute walk away from the Ossuary. This turned out to be great, because the town square and St. Barbara’s Cathedral made the trek out worth it. The Ossuary itself is a bit of a let down.
After the breathtakingly ornate cathedrals in Prague and in Kutna Hora, seeing the Ossuary was almost like stepping into a children’s haunted house. The history behind the Ossuary is pretty interesting, however, the information card they give you and the placards placed around the chapel don’t do it justice (maybe the audio tour does?). The amount of people in the small chapel area taking pictures and talking make the ‘Please be reverent’ signs in the front lobby a bit of a joke.
My advice? Skip the Ossuary, definitely see St. Barbara’s Cathedral. The town square is beautiful and I wish we had more time to explore the rest of the city (there’s at least one other Cathedral and a city tour that we didn’t have time to go to). And if you MUST go to the Ossuary, make sure you’re very familiar with the train schedules – don’t take the bus.

3.5 stars
Most of my colleagues back home thought it strange that we wanted to take a trip out of Praha in order to visit the ossuary. It’s macabre, it’s maybe a tiny bit creepy — why would we want to go?
Honestly, a morbid curiosity drove us. That, coupled with a love of history and a sense of adventure, got us out of the city on our last day in town.
We took the train out, and from the stopping station, it’s about a ten minute walk. They do have shuttles that run on a pretty regular basis, but it’s not a bad walk at all, and after being on a train for an hour, I wanted to stretch my legs.
It’s not hard to find the ossuary itself. There are signs pointing the way, and even if you can’t read Czech, the images are pretty easy to decipher.
The «WOW» factor starts from the outside — the cemetery in front, the sculptures on the street… and then you step inside, and you’re face-​to-​skeletal-​face with the sculptures. And a ticket booth.
I know they have to make their money, to help with the upkeep of the ossuary and the grounds around it, but it’s the first tourist location that *felt* touristy. I don’t know how to explain it.
So, we paid for our tickets (choosing only to visit the ossuary and the cathedral), and added in the audio tour. We thought it was a cheap addition, and it was, for a very good reason. It was short. Super short. Almost ridiculously short.
The tour takes you to four different stopping points along the chapel, which is kind of ridiculous because the chapel itself is tiny. I had expected it to be large, expansive, full to the beams with bones. And while it did have bunches of bones, it certainly wasn’t as large as I had expected it to be.
And the audio guide was really a waste of money, cheap as it was. The guide was most talkative at the very beginning, where he told you how the guide would work. Otherwise, he was abrupt and really didn’t impart much information.
It’s worth a look if you’ve an interest in things like this. I’m glad we went. But, I wish we would have paid a bit more attention to the train schedule, so that we could have gotten back to the city earlier. As it was, we visited the ossuary, the cemetery around it, the cathedral down the street, had lunch, stopped in a couple of the gift shops, and walked back to the station, and still had over an hour to wait for the next train.
So, it’s really not a full-​day trip, if you’re considering going. It’s interesting — some may call it fascinating — but won’t take up your whole day.

This ossuary left me speechless. From the outside, this church looks like nothing special. But once you enter, you will walk straight into one of the most unique, disturbing, enlightening, thought-​provoking places I have ever seen…
Sedlec Ossuary contains 40,000−70,000 human skeletal remains in their final resting place as skull garland, a chandelier which uses every bone in the human body, a coat-​of-​arms constructed entirely of bones, and 4 «pyramids» of bones and skulls meticulously arranged to form what I can describe as a morbidly artful and tedious solution of so many departed person’s wish to be buried in this place. It is/​was sacred ground from the 1200’s, because Henry, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Sedlec, was sent to the Holy Land and he returned with him a small amount of soil he had removed from the Holy Land, which he scattered over the cemetery. Because of this, the cemetery became a sought-​after burial site. The Bubonic Plague and the Hussite Wars left tens of thousands dead, and the cemetery simply couldn’t contain this volume of remains. So in 1870, František Rint, a woodcarver, was employed to put the bone heaps into some kind of order, the macabre result of which you see today when visiting the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora.
From Prague, it takes about 2 hours by metro and then bus to reach the town. From what I’ve read, you can take a train which only takes 1 hour instead of 2.
I think the Ossuary is definitely worth seeing… I doubt you could find something like this anywhere else on such a massive and artistic scale. It’s a powerful and challenging display.

Half the reason we came to CR was for the Bone Church! Should have gotten a longer tour but we did have many other things to see like an awesome church next to the Jesuit school. I forget the name of the church… was a female name… dangit. That was a beautiful church. The whole town that we saw was great. Even got to see a cat.
Even got myself into my local newspaper in the «Around the World» section. Yeah!

How could you not go to the Bone Church? Where else will you see anything like this? It was a morbid highlight of a visit to the Czech Republic. If you are in Prague it is very easy to get too and worth seeing.

* 1400^th review *
Kutna Hora is a well preserved medieval town one hour east of Prague. It’s a former mining town, but these days, it’s famous for its bone church.
In 1870, a woodcarver took the bones of 40,000 people who died from the bubonic plague and created bizarre and weird decorations for the crypt. A fan of the macabre? Something out of the ordinary? Maybe Disney-​esque because of the tourists? You decide.
I got chills in my bones (pun intended) looking at this place. Definitely a sight to see once in your life.

I can not believe some of the other reviews… Maybe I’m a weirdo or something but this was a MAJOR must see for me.
The downfall was that the tour I saddled myself with allocated only 30 minutes to the ossuary.
Maybe some people just don’t «get it». There are the mortal remains of over 40,000 people in here! 40,000+ children, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers who lived their lives here. It’s a testament to the people who died from a monstrous plague and a long war that killed nearly everybody in the area. There are only 20,000 residents TODAY in Kutna Hora…
It is FANTASTIC that a man, a woodcarver, was given the task of putting all of these remains in some kind of an order, and that he came up with this! Party streamers made of human bones! This place is amazing!!!
These are PEOPLE, people!
This is art. Such beautiful deep art.
Just ponder it for a moment. When was the last time you were surrounded by over 40,000 skulls? For me, about a week ago, and it was breathtaking.
I will be back and I will take the train so that I can dictate my own schedule.
I think it is a much better way to spend a day than wasting your money shopping for crap souvenirs in Prague.

So someone took one of my least favorite things (Church) and Pinterst-​style DIY’d it up with one of my most favorite things, the skeletal remains of over 40,000 long-​dead humans.
If death, the macabre, and boner jokes are big in your repertoire, the Sedlec Ossuary is a must-​see place for you. It will definitely take you a hot minute to get here via bus if departing from Prague… I think it was around two hours by charter bus if I remember correctly, but it def seemed like an eternity.
We came in the dead of winter so while the town of Kutna Hora could have been confused for a ghost town, the nice part was that we were basically the only non-​locals roaming the area. There’s several historical churches in the area and you’ll have to do a walk of a few miles to get out to all of them, but it’s a scenic and leisurely walk that even I didn’t mind all that much.
Again, I’m not big on churches, but chances are if you’re here, you probably traveled quite a ways to be here so you might as well make it worth your while and try to visit them all — in which case, you should visit this bone church first, because they sell a bit of a discounted pass to see all the churches, and if you start at some of the other churches, you’ll be stuck buying the passes individually (like we mistakenly did). The total to get in to the churches is pretty nominal and I recall it being somewhere around or under $ 3 (US) a person, but if you can save a few bucks — why not?
The bone church is by far the coolest church I’ve ever seen. Stellar if you have a dark sense of humor (insert humerus joke here) or just love photography. Even my crappy old iPhone pics turned out pretty rad.
The skeletal remains def fall into the category of art, as opposed to some grand masochistic showing. There’s a chandelier made out one of every bone in the human body and gives you the perfect opportunity to recycle that Ali G Show skit from an interview with the surgeon general (at 2:50 to 3:13), which I certainly appreciated and took advantage of.
You can take as many pics as you want but they ask you not use flash, you could even touch a lot of the bones on display and we even found several loose teeth that you WILL be tempted to take (do not).
The bones here are from folks who died looooong ago, mostly from the black plague, and then this creative woodworker decided he would create something out of them since people were dying faster than new graves could dug, so out of necessity, he created this rather strange but beautiful thing.
Like I said, if this is something you find truly interesting** — go for it, but know that it’ll likely set you back an entire day from your travel schedule as the ins and outs of getting to/​from this area from Prague can be confusing and will absolutely be time consuming.
**might also be a great option if traveling with kids. Lord knows I probably would’ve behaved a lot better if my mom took me to a bone church of death than a plain jane roman catholic one.

This is a really cool church… but it’s not really an absolute must-​see attraction or anything. Students get a nice discount when they go there, but the actual church/​exhibit itself is quite small. You walk down a set of stairs and you encounter a rather impressive chandelier made out of bones. The corners of the room are blocked off with major structures of bones, and there’s a pretty nice bone crest/​shield on the left side of the room.
All in all, a small place that’s interesting, but not something that I found to be particularly exciting or worth visiting. Obviously you can’t touch any of the bones, and the four structures in the various corners of the room are more or less the same thing. It’s just the chandelier and the crest that look cool, but you don’t need to make a large effort out of your way to see that when you can just google a picture or look at it on Unilocal.
tl;dr interesting concept and history of the church, but more of a read it on wiki than actually make an effort to go see it kind of thing

A bone church — sounds cool, right? A bit creepy maybe?
Well, to be honest, although the Sedlec Ossuary (Kostnice v Sedlci) is a pretty unique thing and sounds like it can’t be missed, you really can skip this if it’s not already on your route. As in, don’t go out of your way to see this, but if you’re already headed out that way, then a visit wouldn’t necessarily hurt.
Located about an hour east of Prague, this little Roman Catholic chapel on the outskirts of Kutná Hora is a major tourist attraction. But I was mostly disappointed when I arrived. I suppose the main problem is that I expected something subtle, such as a regular chapel constructed from bones. But this was in your face to the point of being kitsch. It reminded me of some kind of theme park attraction, with stacks of skulls and bone chandeliers –overdone to the point of not being very artsy at all. Many of the walls are also covered in fence. This is supposed to protect the bones, but it admittedly looks a bit tacky.
Additionally, it’s quite small — you can see the whole thing and get a real feel for it in five minutes. Entrance costs 90 CZK for adults and 60 for students, which is about $ 5/​$ 3. Also, be careful not to touch anything or you might set off an alarm.
Anyway, to each their own. You may find that you love this place. My overall experience was that it was pretty eh.