Adventures Beyond Prague - A bone church!

KUTNA HORA has the most unusual church I've ever visited.

While it's not unusual for a church to house tombs or a cemetery, the Sedlec Ossuary (aka Bone Church) holds upwards of 7,000 skeletons - many which are artistically displayed inside. The church is from the 13th century but it wasn't until 1870 that the bones were arrange in neatly heaping piles with design elements.

The church draws 200,000 visitors a year, but Kutna Hora's wealth in it's heyday was silver mining.

Neatly piled skeletons rises 15 feet. If you look closely, you can see holes and cracks from fatal blows to the skull of warriors throughout the church. Sometimes you can see cracks that eventually healed.

The chandelier is the masterpiece as well as the centerpiece. It's said to contain at least one of every bone in the human body.

This is the family crest of the Schartzenberg family, who commissioned the compiling and rearranging of the estimated 4,000 to 7,000 skeletons.

A close up of the lower right of the family crest shows a raven made of human bones poking the eye of out of the enemy.

A quiet street near the Sedlec Ossuary

Decorative facades of buildings near the Sedlec Ossuary

A tour of one of the silver mines took us about six stories deep.

Silver mining was hard work but horses were used to pull this contraption called a winch to make it rotate to lift a ton of silver ore to the surface.