Kutná Hora

After a crowded Friday in Praha, I decided to spend Saturday in Kutná Hora. Good decision. This little town an hour outside of Praha is a great day trip. Behind me to the left is the beautiful baroque St. Barbara's Cathedral. It was partly covered for restoration while I was there, but you could still see it's splendor. Directly behind me is the Jesuit College which is spectacular as well. What really made Kutná Hora back in the day was the vast silver mine that employed up to 2000 miners at a time during the 14th to 16th centuries. During that time, one third of all the silver mined in Europe came from Kutná Hora. I got to go on a tour where you actually go through one of these medieval mines. I'll tell you what, when you're digging everything by hand, you really only make passages as large as is absolutely necessary, and not much more. Often they mined what are aptly called "crawling galleries." We went through a passage that for several feet was only about a foot and a half wide. Tight, but a really cool experience.

Near Kutná Hora is the town of Sedlec, and the Church of All Saints. This church is surrounded by a graveyard, and when the plagues and Turkish wars passed through, the cemetery got full, so they started digging people up. Then someone thought it would be a good idea to decorate the church with these bones as a reminder of the bond between this life and the next. So this church is decorated with like 60 000 bones. I'm not going to lie, it was kind of disturbing. Having skulls and bones hanging from the ceiling like party streamers and a chandelier where they were sure to use at least one of every bone found in the human body. Yep, just a little disturbing.