Though it today boasts a population of only 20,000, at its peak during the 14th century, the Bohemian town of Kutna Hora was the region’s second largest city next to the relative metropolis of Prague, some fifty miles away. In the subsequent centuries, that began to change as the city’s silver deposits ran dry and the consequences of the Thirty Years War decimated its populace.

While visitors the world over still visit Kutna Hora to marvel at one of Eastern Europe’s most lauded Gothic edifices, the Cathedral of St. Barbara, the town’s name has become virtually synonymous with its most well-known tourist attraction: the Chapel of All Saints adjoining the 14th century church, Nanebevzeti Panna Marie (“Church of the Assumption of the Virgin”) – which actually lies in the neighboring village of Sedlec, rather that Kutna Hora itself.

The gruesome saga of the Sedlec chapel begins in the 12th century, when Church orthodoxy scattered earth from Golgotha over their graveyard. Soon, throngs of nobility, anxious to secure burial beneath dirt culled from the site of Christ’s crucifixion, pushed the cemetery’s capacity to its limits. Burials continued abreast over the next three hundred years – through plague outbreaks and the Hussite wars - until the Church grounds grew to contain more than 40,000 graves.

In 1870, fearing unsanitary conditions (not to mention a lack of income from fresh burials), Church authorities commissioned local woodcarver Frantisek Rint to “do something creative” with the remains interred in the cemetery. Rising to the ghoulish challenge, Rint soon set about transforming the traditional chapel into an ossuary (known in the Czech language as a “kostnice”) – one that would come to be decorated with thousands upon thousands of human bones.

Using the remains of his countryman as his sole building material, Rint constructed four giant bells in each of the chapel’s four corners, an oversized coat of arms in tribute to Bohemia’s ruling aristocratic family, the Schwarzenbergs, and, at its center, a candle-bearing chandelier made out of every bone in the human body. Proud of his work to the last, Rist left his signature – in bone, of course – upon the steps of the chapel’s entrance.

Much like the catacombs of Paris, Kutna Hora’s Chapel of All Saints has come to be regarded as something of a masterful, albeit grisly, footnote in Europe’s grand architectural history. Despite its reputation as a ghastly tourist attraction, big business hasn’t been deterred from associating their name with the Czech township. Today, one of Kutna Hora’s largest employers happens to tobacco giant, Phillip Morris, which there operates one of its principal European processing facilities.

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