Kutná Hora

I saw this church many years ago and it still ranks in my top 5 most amazing sights (underground salt carvings in Poland, Angkor Wat some of the others). Supposedly the chandelier is made out of every bone in the human body. This is not grotesque or morbid. It’s beautiful. Well worth the side trip from Prague! Larger and more interesting than the ossuary in Rome or the collection of bones under Paris.

Kutna Hora… for me it looks like the Mekka for Metallists, I especially want to visit the ossuary, the temple of bones. Back then dead was just a part of life and people treated it differently back then as they do today. I admire how beautiful the things are they created out of the bones, like the chandelier… It makes you realise that in life we are just a small part of something, just like we are in death…

it’s actually much smaller than i expected, but still worth a trip

make sure you get all the details of how to get there…esp if you don’t speak czech…

i missed a train; took a cab, and was only able to let the cab driver know i want a “church” by pointing to the word on my guide book

then he was pointing me to 2 big ones, one of which i knew was san babara or something like that

so i got off near the other one… walked around it to find the door, and found myself in PHILIP AND MORRIS

good thing is it’s actually a block away from the “bone church” as they call it, and the ppl at philip and morris speak english!

the experience itself is fun

actually the church is close enough to the train station… don’t know why all the directions i read mentioned the buses..

I came for the Ossuary. I had read about it in a pamphlet at my hosstel in Prague, and I decided to venture out. Well my boldness got the better of me and I found myself in a town that I didn’t know how to get out of. It was approaching sundown, and I was wandering through the town in and out of open shops looking for some sign of English, to no avail.

I honestly thought I was going to spend that night, at least, hungry and cold on the streets of a foreign city, as an ugly American.

By the grace of Jehova, a Brazilian guy I’d seen at my hostel comes walking down the stree towards me. I’ve never felt panic drain out of me so quickly. We spoke, and he lead me to the Ossuary. He had just come from there and was on his way to the train station.

That was another thing, the bus I’d rode in on, made no more trips to Kutna Hora, and the only way out was a train station somewhere else. When you’re lost ‘somewhere else’ might as well be in Russia, or figuratively ‘on the other side of town’ I didn’t know ANY sides of town. This young man was my one link to the rest of my former life.

I should have kissed him and bought him ten beers. It was lesson well learned. Be brave, get information, learn the language.

Really interesting, exciting and scary too. It’s sad how goverment of Czech Republic neglects this place. But anyway, you have to see.