And yet here is a different story ....
40,000 dead form morbidly fascinating sculptures and artwork; skeletons meticulously fashioned in 1870 by a wood carver. This is Sedlec's Church: All Saints ossuary in the Czech Republic.
Sedlec is a suburb to Kutna Hora, a town in south Bohemia.
So why were so many corpses buried here, and who was responsible for the works of art? In 1278 the Cisercian abbot of Sedlec, Henry, traveled to Palestine and the 'HolyLand' by order of King Otakar II of Bohemia. He returned with a sample of earth from Golgotha which he sprinkled over the grounds of his local cemetery. The grounds were immediately considered sacred, and hence became a much sought after location for relatives to bury their dead. In the 14th century, the Black Death spread the bubonic plague across Europe and now 30,000 bodies all wanted a resting place within the sacred grounds. Such vast numbers of dead led to the creation of the ossuary in 1511 by a half blind monk who gathered up the bones to be stacked up within the ossuary, making spaces for new corpses, which were soon taken up by more victims from 15th century Hussite Wars. The ossuary itself is situated in the basement of the All Saint's Chapel.
Frantisek Rint, wood carver and artist was employed by the Schwarzenberg family to imaginatively compose the bones into works of art, amongst his creations came the Schwarzenberg family's coat of arms, and a chandelier containing every bone in the human body (although I couldn't say whether this includes the smallest bones found in the human ear!), composed of several bodies. In the four corners of the ossuary sit four 'bells', pile upon pile of bones carefully stacked with a hollowed centre.
http://www.artgraphica.net/art-shop/prague-kutna-hora-bone-church.htm
