Human bones are part of the morbid fascination of Halloween. These human bones are on display everyday, not just for Halloween. The Bone Church is a chapel in the basement of the appropriately named All Saints Chapel in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutna Hora, about an hour from Prague. Halloween, or All Hallows Eve, is celebrated the evening before All Saints Day, a holy day created by the Roman Catholic Church. The pagan and the holy stand side by side on their respective days, Halloween followed by All Saints Day.
A Hallowed Place
A chandelier, a coat of arms made from human bones, and walls of stacked human bones, all sound like part of a Halloween haunted house. Click on the pictures below for larger views. The Bone Church is not pagan, it is on hallowed ground. The graveyard became a destination for those who wanted to be buried in the sacred ground at Sedlec, but the graveyard ran out of space, and room had to be made for other burials.
An abbot of Sedlec monastery, named Henry, traveled to the Holy Land in 1278. He brought back some earth from Golgotha, the place where Jesus was crucified, which he distributed in the Sedlec graveyard, making it famous. The All Saints Chapel was built in the middle of the graveyard after 1400, and the basement chapel was built to contain the bones of those that had been buried there. The job of moving the bones was given to a monk who was partially blind, In the early 1500s.
An Arrangement of Bones
The bones of around 40,000 people, as they can be seen today, were arranged into church sculptures by a wood carver from the area named Frantisek Rindt in 1870. His name is spelled out in bones on one of the walls. He fashioned the chandelier from all of the bones of the human body.
Putti sit atop pyramids of skulls under the chandelier. Swags of skulls hang from the ceiling. Monstrances, urns, and crosses are entirely shaped from bones. The grandness of the coat of arms is indisputable. A crown topped by a cross sits on top of the shield.
The Bone Church will never be considered great art, but there are some people that find a peaceful beauty there. Macabre it may be, sacrilege it is not. The storing of bones in the basements of churches has a long history. Why not store them artfully? Only Christians could be buried in the sacred ground of a monastery, with a proper Christian burial. The bones at the Sedlec Ossuary came from Christians who desired to be buried in ground that had been sanctified with dirt from the site of the crucifixion of Jesus. They are where they wanted to be.
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Corinne Shibley - Corinne Shibley studied sculpture in art history and created her own sculpture on the way to a B.A. in Studio Art. "There's something ...
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