The story of this place
In 1278 the abbot of Sedlec sprinkled soil brought from Golgotha over the monastery graveyard, and all Central Europe suddenly wished to be buried in this 'holy earth'. Plague and the Hussite wars filled it with tens of thousands of dead, and around 1400 a Gothic chapel was raised, its lower level a charnel house. In 1870 the woodcarver František Rint was hired to bring order to the heaped bones, and he did so unforgettably — building a vast chandelier said to use every bone in the human body, a Schwarzenberg coat of arms, garlands, and pyramids, all from the remains of some 40,000 people. Rint even signed his work in bone. The macabre chapel draws hundreds of thousands each year.