Sedlec Ossuary

By tradition the abbot of the Cistercian house at Sedlec, Heidenreich, was sent to the Holy Land in 1278 by Ottokar II of Bohemia and came back with a handful of earth, which he scattered over the abbey cemetery. Word of the act spread, and burial at Sedlec was sought from well beyond Bohemia. Thousands were laid there during the epidemics of the mid-14th century and after the Hussite wars of the early 15th, and the ground had to be greatly enlarged; surviving records put the cemetery at three and a half hectares, with some 40,000 Christians buried in it.

A Gothic chapel of All Saints was raised in the middle of the cemetery around 1400, though some accounts place the start of the work a century earlier. It was built on two levels: a vaulted chapel above, and beneath it a lower chapel to take the bones turned up by the building work and those from graves cleared to make room for new burials. In 1421 the chapel was struck by a destructive fire set by the Hussites. When most of the graves were abolished at the end of the 15th century the exhumed remains were carried into the lower chapel, where, as the story is told, a half-blind monk of the house stacked them into great pyramids in 1511.

Between 1703 and 1710 the chapel was rebuilt as part of a general renewal of the monastery, conceived by Abbot Snopek with the architect Jan Blažej Santini Aichel in his own manner of Baroque Gothic. A new entrance was raised to hold up the front wall, which was leaning outward; the upper chapel was rebuilt, and the ossuary below was given nine bays of stucco ribbed vaulting. The sculpture of these years is by Matěj Václav Jäckel, who carved the Immaculate Virgin on the gable and the free-standing figure of John of Nepomuk before the ossuary. In 1784 Joseph II dissolved the Sedlec monastery along with others, and the monastic estate was bought by the Schwarzenbergs of Orlík.

The Schwarzenbergs had the ossuary put into the form it keeps today. In 1870 they engaged František Rint, a woodcarver from Česká Skalice, to set the heaps of bones in order; the chandelier in the nave is said to contain at least one of every bone in the human body, and the family's arms and Rint's own signature are worked in bone as well. Estimates of the remains held in the chapel run from 40,000 to 70,000 people. The sense of the decoration is memento mori, the Christian charge to remember the last things, and the ossuary is meant as a place of hope that the dead will be raised to eternal life.

In 1970, the centenary of Rint's work, the filmmaker Jan Švankmajer was commissioned to record the ossuary. His ten-minute film cut skeletal images against the flat narration of an actual tour guide; the Communist authorities banned that version for alleged subversion, and the soundtrack was replaced by a short spoken introduction and Zdeněk Liška's jazz setting of Jacques Prévert's poem “Comment dessiner le portrait d'un oiseau”. The guide's original commentary has been available again since the Velvet Revolution.

Over the years structural failure has pulled the building almost half a metre off the vertical, and the extreme damp of the lower chapel has told on the bone decoration and on the masonry, plaster and stucco with it. A phased restoration of the monument began in 2014, together with new trading and service premises. The chapel and its cemetery are protected as a cultural monument of the Czech Republic, and since 2026 have been listed as a national cultural monument; the ossuary is open to the public.