On this episode of FORGOTTEN WORLD we visit a bone church. The Sedlec Ossuary (Czech: Kostnice v Sedlci; German: Sedletz-Beinhaus) is a Roman Catholic chapel, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints, part of the former Sedlec Abbey in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic.
In the Eighth Crusade (1278), King Otakar II of Bohemia sent Jindřich (Henry) the abbot of Sedlec to the Holy Land. Upon his return, Henry brought soil from Golgotha (the site of the crucifixion of Jesus) and spread it in this cemetery.
Centuries later, in 1511, a half-blind monk moved the bones from the graveyard and into an ossuary bet how the chapel.
In the 19th Century, František Rint, a carpenter arranges the bones into sculptures.
It is said that approximately 30,000 skeletons lay at rest here.
Remains that are interred here include those who died from the Great Famine of 1315 and the Black Death in 1348.
Four bell-shaped mounds occupy the corners of the chapel. A chandelier of bones, which contains at least one of every bone in the human body, hangs from the center of the nave with garlands of skulls draping the vault.