The Bone Church, Czech Republic

From Prague, we drove towards Bratislava and stopped in Kutna Hora. There is a church called "the Bone Church", which is full of an estimated 40,000 bodies. The well-known story of the Bone Church in Kutna Hora is that in the 13th century, Jindrich, the abbot of Sedlec monastery, returned from a visit to Palestine with a pocketful of soil and sprinkled it on the cemetery surrounding the Chapel. This direct association with the holy land led to the graveyard becoming a sought after burial site among the aristocracy of Central Europe. At the time of the thirty years' war in the 17th century, the number of burials outgrew the space available, so the older remains began to be exhumed and stored in the chapel. They had to do something with all of the bones, so the church hired a local woodcarver to decorate the chapel with the bones and create a reminder of the impermanence of human life and inescapable death.
There were giant piles of bones stacked neatly in each of the four corners of the church. In addition, there was a giant bone chandelier and a coat of arms, not to mention many other decorations around the church.
When Andrew told me this was our stop along the way, I was a bit apprehensive. However, if you get past the mortality of it, it was actually pretty cool.