To the Bone Church

Story

by Naoise Hefferon

It’s raining on the capital of a former communist country and I’m attracting attention because I look like a walking gumball machine against a sky the colour of burnt books. My white umbrella has broken out in spots of pink and red, orange, purple, green. I hate standing out, being mistaken for a tourist. And though Prague is full of them, I resent their being here and have long since decided that they don’t belong. Prague is a living, breathing sort of city, one that politely mandates being surrendered to. One wherein the more lost you feel, the more a part of it all you actually are. It is the city to wander through at 5 am, teetering among the cobbles, drinking Becherovka as you wait for the sun to up and slip through flying buttresses. Any other time of day the place is thronged with cameras, slow-walkers, and lager louts. And you miss things.

All the same, most of us could do with a break at this stage and it seems ages since I’ve seen any sort of horizon. We lug packs and morning-heads bound for the medieval town of Kutna Hora.

The others are talking about the Bone Church. Thinking the moniker to be self-explanatory I’d not previously bothered to enquire about the details, my interest piqued at once by mere allusions to sex and death. On arrival, I learn its real name is The Ossuary Sedlec and it is the final resting place for the remains of over 40,000 people who died during the 12th and 13th centuries, many of them nobles. At the time, Kutna Hora was a popular place to live due to the wealth generated by the thriving silver industry – most of Europe’s currency at the time was being minted there. However, it was an even more popular place to die. Late in the 11th century, a Cistercian monk set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and returned with ‘sacred earth’ from Golgotha which he then scattered on the cemetery and church grounds. Sedlec soon became renowned as a holy burial ground within the country and all over Europe. People would travel to Sedlec to die, the belief being that burial on sacred grounds would ensure one’s immediate passage into heaven. To no one’s surprise, the cemetery grew crowded in short order. Remains were then kept in a crypt until the 1870’s when the Duke of Schwartzenberg commissioned a local woodworker to adorn the inside of the church with the bones of 40,000.

Once inside, I hear someone say that the chandelier hanging in the middle of the small church has been constructed out of every bone in the human body. I count femurs, pelvic bones, vertebras, and skulls – small ones even, yet to cut teeth. Though visitors carry many different-coloured, laminated pages – English in white, French in blue, and Spanish in pink – they all walk around in a bit of a daze, looking at words on the wall in a language they can’t read, written in parts they possess, written in ribs. They all reach for their sides, blind fingers reading a sort of biological Braille, taking deep breaths as they look for the same bones, feeling from top to bottom - largest to smallest – over their backs and fronts, covered in varying degrees of flesh.

On either side of the chandelier are two cages, which must house over half of the remains. I stand at the base staring up at a mountain of skulls and not knowing quite what to think until I see that the floor of the cage is riddled with foreign coins. My first thought is that people must come to prey on the dead; it’s like some twisted, macabre wishing well. But when I look closer, I see that there are holes in the skulls, bits of bone knocked out and onto the floor, thick with dust. Imprinted in dust on the floor of the cage are the signs of small, stretching fingers - hands that didn’t fit the whole way through the holes in the cage in an attempt to lure teeth into palms as souvenirs. But my inclination to judge such relic-robbers is stifled by a crushing stillness that hangs in the tiny church; upon entering, all voices are subdued to whispers. Even those of the aging women selling postcards and silver spoons - real souvenirs - are hushed by the imposing presence of the 40,000 other people in the room.