This dazzling and disturbing chapel is decorated with the bones of over 40,000 skeletons
If you've ever wanted to see a chandelier made out of every bone in the human body, a chapel in the Czech Republic has you covered.
The history of the Sedlec Ossuary, commonly known as the "Bone Church," begins in the 1200s, when the abbot of the Sedlec monastery brought back some "holy soil" from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The legend says he spread this soil across the Sedlec cemetery, and instantly created what became the hot new burial ground for Bohemia.
By the 1400s, more than 30,000 people had been buried in the cemetery, which had to be enlarged because of the plague in 1318 and the Hussite wars.
But it still just got to be too many bodies, and so at the end of the 1400s, the bodies were dug up, moved to the chapel, and made into pyramids. Those piles stood until they took their modern form in 1870, when an artisan was hired by a noble family to turn them into intricate decorations for the chapel.
Here is what the Sedlec Ossuary, which is said to contain the bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, looks like today:
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