Kutna Hora

May 29th

Today we'd planned on going to a nearby town called Kutna Hora, an interesting 14th century town built on rocks that had once been laced with silver ore. It grew rich on the silver mining and back then, rivalled Prague as the most important town in Bohemia.

A Macabre Monasty

The planned trip never happened tho'. Our trusty guide book became somewhat untrusty as the transport info give in it was not at all correct. The busses that are supposed to leave Prague every hour to Kutna Hora, have in fact been changed to 2 a day! Consequently we missed the early one and the 2nd one would mean a wait of over 3 hours. We canned the idea and did something else. I was rather disappointed as the main attraction of visiting Kutna Hora was to visit the Sedlec Ossuary. This is a monasty, where in 1870, the Schwarzenberg family allowed a local woodcarver to put his creative skills to good use, with human bones that had been piled up in the crypt for centuries!! The bones belonged to 40,000 people and the results of his work are spectacular albeit grissly. Garlands of skulls and femurs hang from the ceiling and in the middle hangs a huge chandelier containing at least one of each bone in the human body! There are 4 pyramids of stacked bones in the corner chapels and crosses and chalices of bone decorate the altar! The entire place has a fascinating but macabre appeal and I really wanted to see this strange place first hand. Anyway, it wasn't to be as tomorrow we leave Prague.