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:
- 2 states where home prices are falling because there are too many houses and not enough buyers
- US buys 81 Soviet-era combat aircraft from Russia's ally costing on average less than $20,000 each, report says
- A couple accidentally shipped their cat in an Amazon return package. It arrived safely 6 days later, hundreds of miles away.
- 9 health benefits of drinking sugarcane juice in summer
- 10 benefits of incorporating almond oil into your daily diet
- From heart health to detoxification: 10 reasons to eat beetroot
- Why did a NASA spacecraft suddenly start talking gibberish after more than 45 years of operation? What fixed it?
- ICICI Bank shares climb nearly 5% after Q4 earnings; mcap soars by ₹36,555.4 crore