Churches are about as different from each other as the people who attend them, but the Sedlec Ossuary is different from just about any other church building you will ever witness. It is a small Roman Catholic chapel situated on the grounds of the Cemetery Church of all Saints in the Czech Republic. The point that is so interesting is not the soaring ceilings, nor the sculptures. The attention-grabber of this chapel is the fact that it is built and decorated with 40,000 to 70,000 human skeletons.

From murals on the walls, to statues of saints and gardeners, to chandeliers, sconces, and statuary around the interior of the chapel, human bones are the main material used for construction and decoration. The chandelier in the entry contains at least one of every single bone in the human body. It is a masterpiece of construction and is beautiful even in its somewhat macabre fashion.

Exhuming the skeletons began around 1511, and the organization and construction using the bones began in 1870 by a woodcarver named Frantisek Rint, hired by the Schwarzenberg family to bring order to the massive heaps of exhumed bones. Though morbid in its use of material, the chapel is a thing of beauty and one has to see it in order to truly appreciate its masterpiece.

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