Two of my new friends from Budapest told me about the “Bone Church” (Kostnice) outside of Prague, so I decided that I had to see it for myself while I was in the city.
After missing the morning train, I decided to flip my day and start at Prague Castle since I still had some sights to see there. I spent some more time on the merchant street, Golden Lane, which was originally created so that people working at the castle had a convenient and affordable place to live. All of the “houses” are very small with some of the doors being only about 5 feet tall. Recently, I have been interested with the whole living in fairly small spaces craze (go to tinyhousedesign.com if you want to see what originally sparked my interest), so I loved seeing some of the layouts of the artisans that used a small place for their home and work life. I guess you could call them the original tiny houses.
Before leaving the castle, I stopped in a dungeon area. While it was interesting to see where prisoners were kept and the torture devices used, I have to say that I am thankful to never have experienced anything like that. And I thought having to go to my room was bad…
I had some time before the next train towards Kostnice, so I just had to stop by the “Dancing House” which was inspired by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, two American dancers.
So I think from now on, I am going to spend a majority of my time just taking train rides because I always seem to meet the most interesting people. Today, I met a Russian woman who worked for her country’s embassy in Prague. She was excited to tell me that she was about to be a grandmother for the first time and that her daughter knew 6 languages (including Romanian…random!). She had spent time working in Australia and Singapore, so we had a pretty interesting conversation about differences in cultures and the way of life in places around the world.
After a quick walk, I found the bone church, which from the outside looks like a normal church with some tombstones lining the grounds.
When you get inside, however, it is not your normal church by any means at all. There is a chandelier, coat of arms and piles to the ceiling of human bones. It is estimated that the bones of about 40,000 people are in this church. I learned that the piles of bones are not even attached to each other or the ground. They were just geometrically fit together.
As the story goes, when the black plague spread throughout the area, there were too many bodies for the burial site that they had to start putting bodies inside the church. Later, a blind (or mad depending on the account) monk began sorting the bones into more orderly piles. In the 1800s, the family that owned the land commissioned a woodcarver to create the different pieces as a reminder of how eternal death is. It was cool to see, but the whole story was a little odd to me and creeped me out just a little bit. As a side note, could you imagine working there or having to clean there? I don't think you could pay me enough.
Before heading back to Prague for the evening, I wandered around the church grounds and the small medieval town of Kutna Hora. I loved that this tree kept on growing depsite a tombstone being in its way.
