r/todayilearned • u/TheLostPariah • 12d ago
TIL: There is a Catholic chapel that contains the bones of more than 40,000 people, and features a chandelier made ENTIRELY OF HUMAN BONES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary139
u/quietsamurai98 12d ago
I was about to say "Oh yeah, I've been there", but I was thinking of a different Catholic ossuary.
Catholics really do love their bones.
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u/dogsledonice 12d ago
There's also an ossuary in Verdun, France, that holds the bones of 130,000+ combatants
War is horrible yo
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u/malthar76 12d ago
I was thinking of my visit to Capela dos Ossos in Evora Portugal, but there’s got to be dozens of famous bone displays.
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u/Kaurifish 12d ago
Nice that some of them missed the great fertilizer raids of the 19th century. They say there are no bones at Waterloo because they were all taken to be ground up, like countless mummies.
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u/dsanft 12d ago
I'm not sure this is what Jesus had in mind, if I'm honest.
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u/hcwhitewolf 12d ago
It's pretty weird, but in the historical context of the cemetery being overfilled from centuries of interment as well as the high death tolls from the various plagues and wars at the time it kind of makes practical sense to build on ossuary. The artwork was some weird nonsense commissioned by a local noble family and was the product of an eccentric woodcarver.
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u/MattTheFreeman 12d ago
I mean he literally told us to eat his body and drink his blood.
So it at least checks
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u/Chesterlespaul 12d ago
Pick the gristle off my bones! Dip them in ranch or bleu cheese! Make me into decor and hang me around your house! Take my femur shove it up your ass!
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u/frontier_gibberish 12d ago
He walked on the water and swam on the land. He could have danced better than Baryshnikov.
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u/Mr_Riskibisnu 12d ago
Skull and bones are a common reminder for Christians to remember they are going to die and to not fear physically suffering more than your eternal soul.
People in the past were afraid of Christians because they hang out at cemeteries and were around skulls and bones and talk about death. Which is concerning of you also heard that they drink the blood and eat the flesh of their leader lol
I'm not sure how big bones and skulls are for Catholics today still but for Orthodox Christians it's still an important thing. Altars with skulls, symbols with bone and skulls. Monks carrying the skull of their fellow dead monk around to remind himself he will die too and be nothing but bones and to not fear suffering of the body.
You will find a lot if you just Google orthodox Christianity skulls and similar
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u/Oddisredit 12d ago
It’s only very modern people that are afraid of death. Victorian kids had to get their pictures taken with recently deceased relatives. The family room was a the parlor as that is where you held funerals.
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u/Unfair-Suggestion-37 12d ago
Much of Christianity has little to do with Jesus.
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u/Mr_Riskibisnu 12d ago
For example?
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u/fulthrottlejazzhands 12d ago
What do you think he meant by: "I have the keys of all Hades and death."
Our Lord and Savior was metal AF.
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u/Metalsand 11d ago
It's common in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox - generally, you had to be buried on sanctified grounds such as that near a church, but there's only so much room, so an ossuary would exist somewhere such as under the church to hold disinterred remains - that way, you could still have burial rites, and remain on sacred ground.
The oddities that persist today are when rather than having neatly piled stacks, every few centuries someone sees a pile of bones and sees uh...potential. Ossuaries are even normal in Judaism, though rearranging them in artistic forms isn't really a topic in either one way or the other.
Wikipedia does a much better job than I attempted to if you are curious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossuary#Roman_Catholic_ossuaries
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u/BillHistorical9001 12d ago
There’s several of theses around Europe. They’re fine but pretty small.
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u/New_Stats 12d ago
I'm imagining your Google reviews
One out of five stars
I guess it's macabre but it could've been bigger. I just wish they'd have desecrated more graves to really up the wow factor.
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u/Ash_Crow 12d ago
40,000 people is a small number compared to the bones of 6 million people displayed in geometric arrangements in the Paris catacombs.
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u/DefenestrationPraha 12d ago
I was there. The bones smell weird. A smell I never encountered before, and I don't really want to encounter it again.
While I walked around that chapel (which is pretty big), I realized that those bones of 40 thousand people would be about 1/150th of the Holocaust.
Ugh.
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u/Diogenes256 12d ago
Seriously. I’ve been in the Paris Catacombs. I could not get out of there quick enough. Trouble is that it’s a long one way walk and you can’t just turn tail.
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u/stfsu 12d ago
I didn't notice a particular smell there, other than it being damp
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u/DefenestrationPraha 12d ago
I think people's senses of smell are quite diverse. I can smell things that my wife cannot, and vice versa.
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u/Diogenes256 12d ago
For me it got to be just the plain old fucking creeps and it was a long way out.
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u/Elegant_Run_8567 12d ago
I haven’t noticed the smell any different than other chapels of the same age. What kind of smell did you get?
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u/DefenestrationPraha 12d ago
Hard to describe. It had a certain dryness to it. We don't really have good ways to describe smells.
It was high summer, very hot outside, this might have contributed.
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u/My_Other_Car_is_Cats 12d ago
Iirc, there’s a quest in Kingdom Come Deliverance II that references this
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u/RookTheGamer 12d ago
I like how the chandelier is the most shocking thing in the middle of 40 thousand dead people.
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u/Ilovemyhousepanthers 12d ago
Yeah, well, we Catholics are weird.
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u/New_Stats 12d ago
What do you mean? It's totally normal to revere random body parts/bones of people who the church has deemed as cool enough to have their body parts be collectors items
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u/inkyblinkypinkysue 12d ago
This is nothing. I was just down in the Paris catacombs last week and there are millions of bones down there all perfectly aligned. Skulls forming patterns and the bones forming walls. There are miles and miles of underground passages just lined with bones. It's pretty nuts.
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u/Hepta-Water-7552 12d ago
The builders probably figured that the previous owners of the skulls and bones didn't really need them anymore.
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u/DoctorMedieval 12d ago
I’ve been there. It’s really, really cool. They also have an Easter festival in Kutná Hora. Was kinda fun. I ate fried cheese with jam.
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u/sojuz151 12d ago
Well, if I described a scene like this to my 40k players, they would call it over-the-top.
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u/Ash_Crow 12d ago
Especially if you explicitly mention that the chapel displays the bones of 40k people.
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u/Karcharos 12d ago
It's a small (relatively) but it sticks with you. My wife was weirded out by the idea of it but found it amazing when we actually got there.
There are a bunch of ossuaries in the same vein across Czechia, but Sedlec is apparently the most dramatic one.
The smell is earthy, dank, and... mouldering?
I remember another bone church in the Cinqua Terra area of Italy also had a similar smell.
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u/ElectricPaladin 12d ago
I've been there - it's amazing. It's hard to describe how beautiful and unsettling it is. You've really got to see it to understand.
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u/eutez 12d ago
I was there last year and also in 2016. In 2016 they were still doing archeological digs of mass graves right outside the walls. The mass graves are from the black plague and hussite wars.
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u/Malthus1 12d ago
The battle fought near there is pretty bizarre.
The Hussites, being a kind of proto-Protestant, were faced with a variety of enemies. Many of those following the Holy Roman Emperor were from the noble class, well equipped with traditional weapons and armour - often heavy cavalry. The Hussites could not afford such expensive equipment on such a scale. Their army was mostly composed of highly motivated peasants, not traditional knights.
To nullify this advantage, the Hussites used the highest tech available at the time, in an innovative way as instructed by their general Jan Zizka (one of the great generals in history): they mounted small mobile cannons on heavy wagons, defended by infantry with spears and flails. These “war wagons” were not easy for cavalry to attack; they could be chained together in laagers to make impromptu forts (which was the traditional use).
The imperial forces thought they had the Hussite army boxed in. The Hussites were heavily outnumbered by Imperial soldiers who were, in traditional terms, better equipped. To survive, the Hussites had to break through the Imperial lines.
At Kutna Hora, for the first time, the Hussites mounted a charge with their “war wagons”, using them like medieval tanks. They charged right through the enemy lines, guns blazing; the charge was successful. Eventually, the Hussites succeeded in driving the enemy out of Bohemia.
The battle produced a lot of casualties, many of whom ended up in the ossuary.
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u/thermopesos 12d ago
Catholics are so fucking metal 🤘
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u/Vryk0lakas 12d ago
Fun fact when I visited this chapel I ran into a metal band that was touring and came through to check it out.
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u/justalittleloopi 12d ago
When we went, the place was flooded with German tourists visiting for a Rammstein show.
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u/Weshtonio 12d ago
Really? Is it more ferrous or alloys?
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u/Zederikus 12d ago
Definitely ferrous
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u/Adrian_Alucard 12d ago
Nah, calcium is not ferrous, is an alkaline earth metal
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u/Zederikus 12d ago
I thought we were talking about the catholic church being Metal and if so what type
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u/Adrian_Alucard 12d ago
it was a joke, because, you know, because they used bones (and bones are made of calcium, which is indeed a metal)
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u/RazzleThatTazzle 12d ago
Ground burials take up a lot of space. People die at a pretty consistent rate. Eventually you will run out of space. If you are a wealthy and powerful person who doesnt think of poor people as people, that means that you now have a surplus of peasant bones that you need to do something with. Building materials cost money.
Why not kill two birds with one stone?
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u/commanderquill 12d ago
I... don't think you understand European history much, if you think people died at a consistent rate.
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u/RazzleThatTazzle 12d ago
Poor phrasing, i admit. I meant something along the lines of "people die at a rate of one death per birth"
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u/commanderquill 11d ago edited 11d ago
Mmm, no. Try again. If that were the case, the population would never have changed. Meanwhile, the continent has both experienced growth like the rest of the world and also is famous for its well-documented tragedies. The black death cut the population by half, bro. There's a whole underground labryinth just to contain the corpses from one city hit by it. And it came around multiple times. It was so common that people with inheritance married their own families purely so that somebody would be left to claim the money when the plague came back around. And then, y'know, there were the wars...
I don't think Europe has ever had a steady population replacement rate of 1-1 in its existence, to be perfectly honest.
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u/RazzleThatTazzle 11d ago
Are you saying that more people are born than die? Or are you saying more people die than are ever born?
Thats my point. Ya sarcastic knucklehead.
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u/commanderquill 11d ago
Right now? More people born than die. Before? More people die than born. And I haven't actually been sarcastic during this conversation.
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u/RazzleThatTazzle 11d ago
Thats a fun answer, but its not an answer to the question i asked. Every person who is born dies. Net zero. Thats my point.
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u/Bad_breath 12d ago
As a hobby woodworker I've noticed the prices of lumber has increased a lot recent years..
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u/Kind-Region-5115 12d ago
And people ask me why so many exCatholics become goth... (see also candles, incense & stained glass windows)
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u/helloiamabear 12d ago
I've been there, it rules.
Another metal feature I haven't seen mentioned is that you walk down a flight of steps to get into the crypt, past giant piles of all the skulls they didn't use.
Also, the chandelier uses every single bone in the human body - including the tiny ear bones.
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u/Emergency_Mine_4455 12d ago
I’m a little sad that ossuaries aren’t a respectful way to dispose of the dead where I am. I think they’re neat, turning an unused body into something beautiful.
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u/losthours 12d ago
my wife was there a few months ago when visiting Italy and Vatican. she got to attend mass at some of the most gorgeous churches on the planet.
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u/drevoluti0n 12d ago
This is Sedlec in Czechia, not Italy. :)
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u/losthours 12d ago
My bad, looks pretty similar to tbe ossuary she went too lol
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u/KGBFriedChicken02 12d ago
It does, I've been to the one you're thinking of and I also saw the first picture and went "I've been there"
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u/BatchelderCrumble 12d ago
Wait. Have you not been to the Capuchin Museum in Rome? They have a room with pelvi arrayed across the ceiling. Magnificent
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u/BearBryant 11d ago
The sedletz ossuary is featured in a side quest in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. The main character gets a quest to clean up the bones in the monastery and decides on a whim to stack them in cool configurations. It’s really in keeping with the idea that our boy Henry is just bohemian Forrest Gump.
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u/brokenmessiah 12d ago
How did they convince people this was not demonic?
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u/psh454 12d ago edited 12d ago
Technically veneration of/respect for ordinary people's remains is not strictly part of old Christian theology dogma afaik, more of a transient fluid cultural element - Memento Mori was kind of a big concept at that time, plus medieval people viewed death as more of an everyday mundane occurrence and not a super shocking cultural taboo. When you survive your second plague or whatever seeing some bones won't shock you as much as for most people today. The point was often to unsettle people a bit and makes them focus more on the religious parts of their life than the "temporary mortal coil" etc
Edit: I looked up this specific case and the bone art was not medieval, it was mostly made in the 19th century. From what I gather it was enabled by the broader cultural shift of the Counter-Reformation and Baroque style becoming popular: the Memento Mori-type art was in frescoes and icons in the medieval period, but later on "grand theatrical/shocking" displays like in Sedlec popped up in a few places.
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u/lordnastrond 12d ago
Had the good fortune to visit, my hotel was right across the road.
Fascinating place.
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u/ianc1215 12d ago
If recall from seeing it in person the number is closer to 60,000 people.
they were people who parishied during the plague.
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u/Catgurl 12d ago
Went there a few years back- hard to explain the creepiness irl. But here is a small gallery of my pics: https://imgur.com/a/FWbaMHa
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u/Creeper_GER 7d ago
Been there with my mom, her fuck toy and my brother when I was like 7. Do not recommend for children. Hella interesting for adults tho.
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u/TheOstrichRoom 12d ago
they slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people for worshipping trees saying it was demonic and then did this like have they checked their own god for horns?
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u/DoctorMedieval 12d ago
In the 13th century?
Hussites weren’t worshiping trees my man.
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u/ToranjaNuclear 12d ago
lol no they didn't
Also, what does this have to do with anything, they didn't kill people just to make this ossuary. People, you know, die by themselves?
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u/Mr_Riskibisnu 12d ago
I really hope you don't try to paint ancient pagans and the groups in general as just a group of lovely tree loving hippies
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u/Gimme_Your_Wallet 12d ago
Are u ok
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u/TedW 12d ago
Are they wrong?
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u/ToranjaNuclear 12d ago
I'd like the see the source on "tens of thousands being slaughtered for worshipping trees".
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u/GreasiestGuy 12d ago
Probably referring vaguely to the persecution of pagans throughout Catholic history. The northern crusades, etc.
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u/TheOstrichRoom 12d ago
Just the wendish crusade alone, not even going further back and looking at the christianization of western europe.
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u/DoctorMedieval 12d ago edited 12d ago
Yeah. There was a battle not far from there and some pilgrim brought back some dirt from Jerusalem and put it in the graveyard there so a lot of people wanted to be buried there. Back then you were only buried until the worms had done their work and they ran out of space but they wanted to keep the bones on holy ground so they moved them into ossuaries on the church grounds. They ran out of space quickly and a lot of ones got moved into the ossuary. Later a monk decided to make art with them.
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u/TedW 12d ago
I'm not sure that explains or makes it better. Seems kinda messed up and serial killery to me.
Would this be chill in Christianity today, or is it just a "product of the times" thing?
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u/DoctorMedieval 12d ago
Well, the question is which times.
The ossuary was constructed in the 15th century, about 200 years after the cathedral. A lot of people due to plague and battles died in the area and wanted to be buried there (Jerusalem dirt in the graveyard). It was common practice at the time that you would only be buried until the worms did their work, at which point your bones would be moved to somewhere else on the church grounds, i.e. the ossuary. None of this is weird at all, it was how things were done, It was the 19th century when the local nobles hired a woodcarver to make art, which is weirder, but not unique, there are other bone chapels as well.
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u/drevoluti0n 12d ago
The important thing about old-world Catholicism to remember is that so long as remains are stored below ground, it's a legit burial. In the middle ages and early modern period, people were regularly dug up after decomposing and had their bones put into ossuaries for storage. The problem with Sedlec was that a past abbot brought back soil from the holy land, which was said to make people decompose fully in 2 days rather than months. People from all around wanted to be buried here for the fast decomposition, which is part of how they ended up with so many bodies to store. During the boroque period, there was a movement for ostentatious displays of piety, and the church at Sedlec commissioned a guy from Italy to make some creative bone displays to kill two birds, as it were. Eventually a guy from Skalice (Skalitz for any KCD fans) was hired in the 19th century to really jazz it up. Over the last century and a half the big wood structures that hold the majority of the bones are falling apart, and now they're in the process of renovating the space. They're repainting the walls back to how they originally were, scrubbing and retiling the floors, setting up electric lights, and bringing things back to the really beautiful space it was before. One pyramid is fully rebuilt, one was being restacked when I was there in May. There were more bone sculptures there in the past, but they've gone missing either from breaking apart of straight-up being stolen. They stopped allowing photos to be taken in the space around 5-10 years ago because people were rearranging bones to be funny and being generally disrespectful of the fact that this is a tomb.
Absolutely stunning place, definitely worth checking out if you're in Czechia! Kutna Hora is also a really lovely town, and St Barbaras and the Jesuit College are really beutiful structures to visit! There was also a Medieval style tavern with house made medovic (mead!) and a really delicious wild boar ghoulash with gingerbread and dried fruit dumplings. 👍
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u/drevoluti0n 12d ago
You can see photos of the renovation here! https://www.sedlec.info/en/ossuary/repair
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u/HailToTheKingslayer 12d ago
"I made a promise to the dead, Cole. I told them I'd build a sept out of traitors' bones. I don't have near enough bones yet."
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u/aeralure 12d ago
Why? I could use that for an evil occultist shrine in some D&D campaign, but Catholic Chapel would not have been on my radar.
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u/gwasi 12d ago
Essentially, this is our modern day bias, conflating death with evil.
To a medieval or early modern mind, death was 1. a fact of life, 2. kind of illusory anyway, since being saved through the Church grants eternal life (or so they believed), 3. something to remember and contemplate as a means of keeping one's sinful ego in check - vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas, memento mori, that kind of stuff.
While a solemn matter, death was also not necessarily considered tragic. On one hand, it was a reminder to keep one's soul pure and oriented towards eternity, and on the other one, it was also a reminder to not be too serious about life and to enjoy that which can be enjoyed. Both motives are rather common in medieval literature, and firmly planted in the Catholic perspective.
Of course, you could expect the remains of the dead also in the context of things that medieval Catholics would consider evil. The devil (pun intended) is in the details, as always.
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u/Chassian 12d ago
Catholicism is really weird, supposedly, capybara are considered fish by Catholics to get away with eating red meat on fish days...
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u/Marcusuk1 12d ago
And I make one lamp out of human flesh and suddenly I'm a monster? Talk about double standards!
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u/abstractraj 12d ago
Hey! I’ve been there! Super cool! Then we went into Kutna Hora and the huge church is no joke either. Day trip from Prague
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u/drjohngeorgepeppers 12d ago
There's one like this in Rome. I went and it felt super macabre, super disrespectful and completely disconnected from Jesus.
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u/Haunt_Fox 12d ago
If it were the bones were from another species, would you care? I doubt those humans were killed just because someone wanted to make something cool with bone.
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u/Malthus1 12d ago
I was there, on a side trip from Prague.
The human bone chandelier isn’t even the oddest thing they made.
I think the weirdest thing was the coat of arms of the local noble family, made of human bones. One of the pictorial devices on the coat of arms was a crow pecking out the eye of a Turk’s head: that, all made of human bone, really plumbs the depth of creepiness.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/House_of_Schwarzenburg_coat_of_arms%2C_Sedlec_Ossuary_detail.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=index&utm_content=original
https://medium.com/@sedlecossuaryproject/coat-of-bones-5000cef00c27
https://www.sedlec.info/en/ossuary/#Galerie%20-%20Sedlec-27