I've always thought that the best way to decorate a home (or office, or anywhere, really) is to fill it with bookshelves. A fireplace, a window or two, and some good reading lights, and you're good to go.
Then I visited the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora and changed my mind. Screw the bookshelves. This is interior design at its finest.
Then I visited the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora and changed my mind. Screw the bookshelves. This is interior design at its finest.
In 1278, the Abbot of Sedlec went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and brought back soil from Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified. Word spread of the Abbot's journey and the holy soil he'd sprinkled over the abbey cemetery, and Sedlec soon became a popular burial place for Catholics from all over Europe. With the Black Death and Hussite Wars during the 14th and 15th centuries, the cemetery reached its capacity, and a new chapel was constructed with an underground ossuary that could accommodate large numbers of dead in mass graves.
Monks began exhuming skeletons and arranging them in the chapel during the 1600s. They sought to represent the spiritual relationship between life and death. Or something like that. I kind of feel like whoever designed the chandelier that contains every bone in the human body didn't do it entirely for the religious symbolism.
The ossuary contains bones from 40,000 people. Strings of skulls hang in the corners and have been draped across the ceiling like garlands. Bones are arranged into fountains and candelabras. There are four heaping piles of femurs, each bordered with skulls and topped with a giant golden crown.
There is even an intricately-designed shield, perhaps three meters in height. In the bottom right corner is a bird that appears to be either giving love-pecks or plucking out the eye of the poor fellow on whose shoulder he is sitting.
As I wandered through, I tried to think of a word that would adequately describe what I was seeing. Morbid? Garish? Creepifying? Nothing really captured the essence.
Then my mental soundtrack took up the sprightly refrains of Danse Macabre, and I was struck by an image of skeletons dancing. Metatarsals tapping to the beat. Vertebrae swaying in the moonlight. Pearly-white phalanges dragging a bow across the strings of an old violin. Cap'n up there with his trusty parrot leading the gang, all hopping and cavorting through the graveyard.
Then my mental soundtrack took up the sprightly refrains of Danse Macabre, and I was struck by an image of skeletons dancing. Metatarsals tapping to the beat. Vertebrae swaying in the moonlight. Pearly-white phalanges dragging a bow across the strings of an old violin. Cap'n up there with his trusty parrot leading the gang, all hopping and cavorting through the graveyard.
The Sedlec Ossuary represents something most aspiring interior designers can only dream of achieving: a space that not only defies verbal description as true art does, but actually brings plague victims back from the dead.