Sedlec Ossuary

A small Gothic chapel at Sedlec, on the edge of Kutna Hora in Bohemia, decorated almost entirely in arranged human bone, estimated at the remains of forty to seventy thousand people. Local tradition holds that an abbot returning from the Holy Land in the thirteenth century brought back earth from Golgotha to sanctify the adjoining cemetery, making burial there so desirable that the grounds had to be repeatedly expanded; plague and the Hussite wars filled it further through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. When a chapel was needed to hold the resulting overflow of remains, a woodcarver named Frantisek Rint was hired in 1870 to arrange the bones into chandeliers, garlands and a coat of arms, the decoration still on public display today, making the chapel one of Europe's most visited memento mori sites.