Sedlec Ossuary

Sedlec Ossuary, also known as the Bone Church, is a Roman Catholic chapel in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic, adorned with human bones from an estimated 40,000 to 70,000 people.

Planning your visit

Sedlec Ossuary contains the bones of somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 people, arranged as decoration. The chapel sits beneath a cemetery church at Kutna Hora, and the cemetery became extraordinarily desirable after an abbot sprinkled soil brought from Golgotha over it in the thirteenth century — followed by the Black Death and the Hussite wars, which filled it beyond capacity.

The exhumed bones were stacked in the chapel for centuries, and in 1870 a woodcarver named Frantisek Rint was employed to arrange them. He produced an enormous chandelier said to contain every bone in the human body, pyramids, garlands, a coat of arms of the Schwarzenberg family, and his own signature in bones on the wall.

It is genuinely unsettling and also a serious memento mori rather than a curiosity.

Photography restrictions and timed entry now apply, following years of visitor behaviour the church found unacceptable.

Kutna Hora also holds the Gothic St Barbara's Cathedral.

Bookable options include day tours from Prague. Current availability is listed below.