Sedlec Ossuary

Where it sits. The ossuary lies under the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Sedlec, a northern suburb of Kutná Hora about 70 kilometres east of Prague, a ten-minute walk from Kutná Hora hlavní nádraží railway station and a good three kilometres from the medieval silver town most visitors have come to see. The building above ground is modest: a two-level Gothic chapel of around 1400 given a Baroque outer casing between 1703 and 1710 by Jan Santini Aichel, the architect who invented Bohemian Baroque Gothic. Everything that matters is down a short flight of stairs, in a low, cold, cross-shaped crypt lit by small windows.

The story behind it. In 1278, Henry, abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Sedlec, was sent to the Holy Land by King Ottokar II and came back with a jar of earth taken from Golgotha, which he scattered over the abbey graveyard. Word travelled, and Sedlec became one of the most desirable burial grounds in central Europe. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century and the Hussite Wars of the early fifteenth filled it many times over; the cemetery had to be enlarged repeatedly, and when the chapel was built around 1400 the bones turned up during construction were stacked in the lower level. A half-blind monk is said to have begun arranging them after 1511. The abbey that had owned the ground was dissolved by Joseph II in 1783 and its buildings were sold off — the great Cistercian church next door spent years as a tobacco factory — which is how the bone chapel came to belong to a noble family rather than an order. The decisive intervention came in 1870, when the Schwarzenberg family hired the woodcarver František Rint to bring order to the heaps. Rint's solution was to build with them. The chapel now holds the remains of somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 people.

What you actually see today. Four enormous bell-shaped mounds of stacked bones occupy the corners of the crypt. From the centre of the vault hangs a chandelier said to contain at least one of every bone in the human body, with garlands of skulls looping outward across the ceiling. Flanking the altar are pyramids and monstrances of bone; on one wall hangs the Schwarzenberg coat of arms rendered in vertebrae, ribs and skulls, complete with a raven pecking at the severed head of a Turk, a heraldic reference to the family's campaigns. Rint signed his work near the entrance — in bone. Several skulls near the entry carry visible sword and mace injuries from the Hussite fighting, which is the moment the arrangement stops reading as decoration and starts reading as history. Photography rules have tightened in recent years and tripods and flash are not permitted; commercial and social-media shoots require prior written permission.

On screen. The crypt has a longer film history than its size suggests. In 1970, on the centenary of Rint's work, the Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer was commissioned to document it and produced The Ossuary, a ten-minute film of hard-cut skeletal images laid over a real tour guide's flat narration. Communist censors judged it subversive and replaced the soundtrack with a jazz setting by Zdeněk Liška of a Prévert poem; the original guide track was restored only after 1989. The chapel served as a location for the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons film and for Blood & Chocolate (2007), it is described in the closing scene of Spike Jonze's Adaptation, and Rob Zombie has credited it as the visual source for Dr Satan's lair in House of 1000 Corpses. It is also a much-copied image in album art and music video, which is how most people first encounter it without knowing where it is.

Getting there and timing. Direct trains from Prague hlavní nádraží reach Kutná Hora hlavní nádraží in under an hour, and the ossuary is signposted from the station; a local shuttle train continues to Kutná Hora město for the historic centre, or it is a forty-minute walk. A combined ticket covers the ossuary, the Cathedral of the Assumption of Our Lady and St John the Baptist next door — itself a Santini masterpiece and a UNESCO-listed church that almost nobody visits — and St Barbara's Church in the town. Visitor numbers exceed 200,000 a year, timed entry is in force, and midday coach arrivals from Prague can fill the crypt completely; the first hour after opening is the sane choice. The site is a working religious space with a request for quiet behaviour, and the stairs down to the crypt are steep and narrow with no lift, which rules out step-free access.