Kutna Hora
Getting to Kutna Hora is easy, and challenging at the same time. From Prague you can get there by train in under an hour, but the question is which train to take. There is no direct line to Kutna Hora, and the easiest way to get there is to take a train heading for Brno. Just a tip, while you can spend a little more for a first class ticket, and we have done that plenty of times in other countries, the difference between the first and second class on this train was negligible and second class seats were completely fine. When you get there you want to get off at the first Kutna Hora station. The second one, Kutna Hora Mesto, is in the center of the old town, but the walk between the first and second station has some of the best sites and is worth the walk.
As you leave the train station head towards the city center and you will come to the Cathedral of the Assumption of Our Lady at Sedlec. The church was built originally in late 13th Century as part of the Sedlec Monastery the town was built around, but was destroyed in the 1421 after the Hussites burned it to the ground. After a rebuild in the late 17th Century, the cathedral now is a unique mix of Gothic and Baroque architecture. As you walk in you will notice there is very little painted on the walls like many other European cathedrals, but that doesn't take away from the uniqueness of this place. Walk along the wall and see the skulls from some of the monks who were killed by the Hussite raiders, and whose bones were discovered in the wall during the rebuild. Take the stairwell to the top of the transept for a behind the scenes walk through the roof of the cathedral. When you get to the end you will have a bird's eye view of the entire church. When you return to the bottom walk to the front and see the remains of St. Vincent and St. Felix, two Catholic saints whose remains were given to the cathedral in 1742 to mark the 600th anniversary of the monastery. The oddest part about the remains of these two saints is not that they have parts of their bodies, but that they have put plastic parts in there to make a complete skeleton. The face was missing on one of the skulls, so they just put a plastic mask on the skull to complete it.
After you leave the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption walk directly across the street to one of the weirdest things you are ever going to see at the Sedlec Ossuary. In 1278 the abbot of the monastery was sent to Israel by the King of Bohemia. When he returned he brought home some of soil from the Holy Land which he sprinkled around the cemetery of the abbot. After hearing word that the ground of the cemetery had been sanctified, thousands from around the kingdom wanted to be buried on this site. Following the Black Death, the invasion of the Hussites in the 15th Century, and the thousands of people who died naturally more than 40,000 people were buried on this site over the next five centuries. So many people were buried at this site the monks who controlled it began a very odd tradition. They began making art work out of the bones. Throughout this site you will see some of the eeriest tributes you could imagine. In each corner of the room there is one of four pyramids made of real skulls, leg, and arm bones. In the middle of the room sits a chandelier made of skulls and jaw bones. There is even a coat of arms for the Schwarzenberg family who paid to renovate the ossuary in the 1870's. If that all wasn't weird enough, when we walked outside there were archaeologists excavating around the edges of the church. In what must have been a fifteen foot deep pit there were layers of centuries of remains. Watching as they cleaned off what seemed like an infinite number of remains seemed every person who had ever died must have been buried there.
When you leave the Sedlec Ostuary take the walk through center of town, its about a half hour walk to the center of Kutna Hora. There you will see some beautiful Renaissance and Victorian architecture that shows you the history of the city in several blocks. As you walk through town the main attraction of the city sits hovering above the city watching over everyone. The Cathedral of St. Barbara is one of the most impressive cathedrals outside of Rome you may ever see. The UNESCO protected site began in the late 14th Century, and like many of the massive cathedrals through Europe, took several centuries to complete. As you walk towards the three tent pole like peaks of the the Gothic cathedral it gives you an impressive view of the city from the highest point in the city. When you get inside take a left and walk around to look at the altars that line the wall. The first altar piece, called Our Lady Enthroned, is from 1380, and somehow has made it through three quarters of a thousand years in remarkable condition. You will see frescos along the wall that were inspired by the miners who helped to build the wealth of the city centuries ago. Some are very difficult to explain, like the giant man carrying someone one his back. I've never seen imagery like that in any other church. Look up at the ceiling and see the coats of arms and trade union shields that represent those who played a part in building the church. When the silver ran out in the 16th Century, the construction on the church came to a stop, but over the next three centuries they finally completed the church.
If none of these sites do it for you, maybe you want to come in the spring to see a Czech circus perform. As Wendy and I were making our walk towards the Cathedral of St. Barbara we found out the Czech people have an extreme level of confidence in their orange plastic fencing. Sitting between two streets was a traveling circus I can only imagine is the pinnacle of street side entertainment in the central Czech Republic. Out in the open were multiple zebras, camels, longhorn steers, and of course, an elephant, all being held in by orange temporary fencing. Should those fences shockingly fail to restrain the multi-ton animals, there was a collection of RV's parked around the fences that would have either stopped the animals or forced them to work on their problem solving skills before they trampled the people of Kutna Hora.
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