A church of bones

What can be a more sobering reminder of the fragility of human life and its impermanence than an ossuary? A church made up of human bones? I am in Bohemia, just on the outskirts of that beautiful, mournful, Czech capital Prague and have goose bumps on my arms as I contemplate life and its meaning. Kutna Hora, an ancient mining town in this part of eastern Europe, has its share of castles and chapels. But it really is the kostnice, as it is called in Czech, the small Roman Catholic chapel located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Sedlec, a suburb of the town, that is the main draw here.

Where else in the world, after all, can you visit a church not just containing the bones of more than 40,000 once-living people but also artefacts and decorations made out of these? Call it macabre or what you will, the chapel exerts a strange pull on us on the afternoon we visit it; standing in its small cavernous enclosure, one level beneath the ground, gaping at the overwhelming chandelier, chalices, wall décor and even a coat of arms, all fashioned out of human bones. Life, afterlife, everything becomes beautiful.

The chandelier is quite the centrepiece — reputed to contain at least one of every bone that makes up the human body. There are garland style decorations on the walls, smaller skulls of children neatly arranged in a pattern to make it almost look ornamental and pretty. There is also the large coat of arms of the Schwarzenberg family that owned the estate and commissioned the works as also a signature of Frantisek Rint, the Czech woodcarver, who executed these pieces in bone in 1870.

But the chapel itself is much older — dating back to the medieval times — and if you have been wondering at how the bones came to be collected at this site in the first place, there’s a fascinating story to it. Apparently, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery here was sent to Jerusalem in the 13th century by the king of Bohemia. He returned with some mud from the holy land that was sprinkled over the abbey. This made it the preferred burial spot for many privileged central Europeans. But in the 14th century, with disease and war wiping out entire townships, many thousands were buried here in anonymous, mass graves. In 1400 AD, a Gothic-style church was built here to be used as an ossuary for the mass graves unearthed during the construction of the church.

As more and more people kept getting buried on these grounds, the next century saw a blind monk — or thus the legend goes — getting the task of exhuming the older bones and stacking them up in some order. Finally, in the beginning of the 18th century, the upper part of the church was rebuilt in the baroque style and given the shape that it has even today. While it was only in 1870 that the woodcarver was commissioned to work on the bones, the result is now there for all of us to see.

But if the ossuary is the most stunning part of our travel to this ancient land, it certainly is not an isolated example of the nerve-wracking Gothica that you can still encounter in the Czech Republic, so many centuries later. Instead, the very air of the country is sombre with remains of the past. There are stunning churches and castles strewn across the landscape that evoke that certain atmosphere that everyone from Shelly & Co, the romantic poets, to Bram Stroker and his Dracula may have thrived on. It’s a countryside that will stimulate your imagination, leaving it overwrought with tales of another day — of fierce wars and fiercer sports as land-owning families hunted down elusive beasts and then devoted entire sections in their castles to not just trophies but heads of “fantastic” beasts, clearly more the handiwork of man than nature.

And there are pilgrimage churches in the memory of martyrs, often felled cruelly, but whose names have lived on. Zd’ar nad Sazavou, quite close to Kutna Hora, has, for instance, the wonderous Pilgrimage Church of St John of Nepomuk, a Czech martyr. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the final work of Jan Santini Aichel, a Bohemian architect who combined the baroque with references to Gothic elements in construction and design.

Sunday 3 February 2013

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