Fools and Idiots

And the hip bone is connected to the arm bone?

Author's note: admittedly this is a little outside the normal topics for this blog since there aren't any fools or idiots involved. However, it was deemed to qualify on the strength of sheer bizzareness.


About an hour southeast of Prague is a little town that had one of the earliest Catholic churches in the area (the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora). The Abbot made a pilgrimage to the holy land in about 1300 AD, bringing back some dirt from Golgatha which he sprinkled on the cemetery. For you heathens out there, this means the cemetery was now by extension holy ground itself. So everyone and his brother wanted to be buried there. Literally.

Fast forward several hundred years and the little church cemetery had the bones of approximately 40,000 people and was in a serious real estate crunch. Some bright monk got the idea to use them to decorate the lower chapel for an object lesson in the impermanence of life. They've been rearranged a couple of times since then, not to mention bleached and white washed, but the concept remains. As with so many such things, no words can describe this so I offer pictures instead.




And the most bizzare part about the whole thing is that as gruesome as the whole concept is and as freaky as the pictures are, when you're there in person there's just a sense of macabre splendor, rightness, and even peace. Despite the ticket takers and all the tourists with their cameras, this IS a holy place.

posted by bazilsmom @ 10:26 PM