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gothiccruise
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(Review by Peter Greenberg)
Most churches offer a heavenly sanctuary for the masses, but once you walk into the Sedlec Ossuary chapel, also known as the Chapel of All Saints or Bone Church, and catch a glimpse of its chandelier, you’re more likely to feel more nauseated than enlightened.
Located in Sedlec, Czech Republic, this church’s chandelier (image courtesy of Czech Tourism) is not constructed of dainty crystals but of freakish phalanges and other bony accoutrement—at least one of each bone in the human body. Skeletal aesthetics decorate almost the entirety of the chapel’s interior.
Built around the year 1400, the chapel rests on the cemetery of the Cistercians monastery, a cemetery used for burying those killed in the Black Death during the 14th century. According to legend, a half-blind monk had the task of exhuming the skeletons and stacking the remains inside the church.
Much later in 1870, the Schwarzenberg family commissioned František Rint, a woodcarver, to bring order to the heaps. He tucked four large mounds of bones into each corner of the chapel, attached garlands of skulls to the chandelier, and fashioned a large Schwarzenberg coat-of-arms, two monstrances—vessels used to display the consecrated Eucharistic Host—and beside the main altar “signed” his name in bones over a bench. An estimated 40,000 bones appoint this “chest” of human skeletal treasures.
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