Ossuaries and Bone Churches: Why Some Churches Are Decorated With Bones

Few places on earth look as startling as a church whose chandelier and furnishings are made of human bones. They are real, and they are still churches. The Sedlec Ossuary is among the most visited attractions in the Czech Republic. This article explains why they exist and what the people who made them wanted to say.

What is an ossuary?

A place for keeping the bones of the dead. Live the World explains that the main reason for ossuaries, or “bonehouses,” is to make space for the newly dead: when cemeteries filled up, there was no choice but to remove older skeletons.

What is the Sedlec Ossuary?

The best-known bone church, in the Czech Republic. Wikipedia describes it as a Roman Catholic chapel beneath a cemetery church, holding an estimated 40,000 to 70,000 skeletons, many arranged as decorations and furnishings. It draws over 200,000 visitors a year. Many thousands of people were buried in the abbey cemetery during the Black Death in the mid-14th century. Many more were buried after the Hussite Wars in the early 15th century. The cemetery had to be greatly enlarged. Around 1400, a church was built over it, with a lower chapel for the bones dug up from mass graves. After 1511, the work of digging up skeletons and stacking the bones was given to a monk of the order. Then, in 1870, a woodcarver named František Rint was hired by the Schwarzenberg family to put the bone heaps in order, which gave the ossuary its famous look. Rick Steves reports that the ossuary has a chandelier made with every bone in the human body.

What did the monks mean by it?

Something spiritual, at least at first. Rick Steves writes that the monks who stacked the bones about 400 years ago wanted viewers to remember that the church is a community of both the living and the dead. Later bone-stackers, he says, were more interested in design than theology. The effect was a lesson much like memento mori: remember that you will die.

Where else are there bone churches?

In many parts of Europe. In Rome, Rick Steves says, the Capuchin Crypt holds the bones of about 4,000 monks who died between 1528 and 1870. Religion Unplugged adds that after the crypt was built, the Capuchin friars began to donate their own skeletons to be added when they died. In Hallstatt, Austria, space was so limited that bones got only 12 years in the churchyard before making way for the newly dead, Rick Steves reports. Discovery notes that over 600 of the skulls there bear the person’s name, profession, and date of death. Rick Steves says the practice there stopped in the 1960s, about the time the Catholic Church began permitting cremation.

Is this some kind of cult practice?

No. One overview points out that the Sedlec chapel is a Christian church, not a cult or ritual space as is often rumored. The bones are the remains of the community’s own dead, and the message is a reminder, not a shrine. For a related image from the same era, see The Grim Reaper and the Dance of Death, and for the symbol of the skull, Why Are Skulls a Reminder to Live?.

Where can I read more about how cemeteries changed?

See The History of the American Cemetery, and for the plague that filled so many cemeteries, The Black Death and the Burial of the Dead.