The Church of All Saints with the ossuary is a two-storey cemetery church in Sedlec near Kutná Hora, built in the first half of the 14th century as part of a Cistercian monastery.
The Church of All Saints with the ossuary stands in Sedlec in the vicinity of present-day Kutná Hora in the Central Bohemian Region. It was built in the first half of the 14th century and belonged to a Cistercian monastery that no longer exists.[1]
The monastery and the cemetery
The nobleman Miroslav donated large estates near present-day Kutná Hora to the Cistercians. The oldest monastery of this order on the territory of today's Czech lands has a foundation charter dating from 1142. In the first half of the 13th century the monastery declined for lack of money, but in the second half of the same century one of the monks found silver on the monastery's land, the monastery grew rich and Kutná Hora came into being.[1]
In the 14th century Kutná Hora had almost 80 thousand inhabitants. People there died of hunger, of plague, in mining, because of poor hygiene and in armed conflicts. Most of the dead were buried in Sedlec, where the only functioning Christian cemetery stood, which at the end of the 14th century covered 3.5 hectares. According to legend, the cemetery's popularity was increased by the fact that Abbot Heidenreich brought back a handful of soil from Hakeldama from his journey to Jerusalem and thus founded the first holy field in Central Europe.[1]
Origin and construction
Because many people died in the 14th and 15th centuries and space later had to be freed up, it was necessary to reduce the cemetery and to deposit the excavated bones with reverence. Christian custom requires skeletal remains to be placed below ground level, and so a two-storey cemetery church was built. Remains were deposited in the underground lower chapel, and services for the dead were held in the upper one.[1]
The exact date of the church's completion is not known; experts incline to the first half of the 14th century.[1]
Later history
During the Hussite Wars in 1421 the roof and the structure of the church probably suffered. The Gothic cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Baptist, which stands nearby and was built between 1290 and 1320, was burned down and the Cistercians were murdered there. Life returned to the monastery slowly, probably not until around the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. In the 17th century the church underwent a partial repair.[1]
At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries Abbot Jindřich Snopek obtained funds for the repair of the cathedral and invited leading artists to work on it, among them the architect Jan Blažej Santini Aichel. Santini also repaired the church with the ossuary and is regarded as the creator of the first decoration of the lower chapel made of bones.[1]
Emperor Joseph II dissolved the Cistercian monastery in 1783 and its buildings were sold at public auction. The cathedral began to serve as a warehouse, tobacco was processed in the convent and patronage over the Church of All Saints was taken over by the Schwarzenberg family. The cemetery was reduced and the bones from the abolished graves were placed partly in the ossuary and partly in a mass tomb. During the 19th century the Schwarzenbergs financed an extensive reconstruction of the ossuary, connected with the renewal and extension of the skeletal decoration. It was completed in 1870 and its author was František Rint.[1]