With Prague as a home base, it was my intention to visit a couple of small towns in the Czech Republic. The next morning I boarded a train for a day trip to Kutná Hora, a medieval town settled by a group of monks in the year 1142 and well-known for its silver mines.
In his hilarious account of European travel, "Neither Here Nor There," Bill Bryson writes of this same borough. I remembered Mr. Bryson's admonition to avoid, at all costs, one particular and gory monkish site. Duly noted and thank you, Bill.
I disembarked and, unsure of where the train station was in relation to the actual town, trailed a group of Czech students on their own sightseeing excursion. Surely they would lead me to the town....Oh, hey...where are we going...? In there...? Okay, then—
And I landed in the exact spot I wanted to avoid. The one place Bill Bryson alerted his readers to shun: the Sedlec Ossuary, or the bone church of Kutná Hora.
The Black Plague of the thirteenth century swept across Europe, killing millions. Here, in the town of Kutná Hora, a monk went completely cuckoo as bodies piled high. With the assistance of his half-blind brother monks, he constructed a ghastly "holy" shrine to the victims...using the bones of the dead.
I found myself trapped in this stifling, horrific and cramped display. Stuck behind a gaggle of giggling teens, retreat was not an option. Forced forward, I tried not to even glance at the bone chandeliers, the bone candelabras, the bone chalices and the hundreds of skulls hanging from the ceiling. I failed.
Hard to miss the cavernous holes where eyeballs used to be. I pushed my way through the crowd, out the back door and into a fenced graveyard to suck in the clear October air and....good Lord, it went on. Skeletons of bony scarecrows were everywhere. As if randomly dropped, skulls lay staring at a blue sky. The joint was seriously creepy and foreshadowed my further misadventures in Kutná Hora.
Climbing hilly territory through the picturesque and walled village, I arrived at a gothic, fortressed peak. A painted sign advertised visits into a defunct silver mine. The ticket seller informed me the current tour would be led by a German-speaking guide, and perhaps I would be better served by a private English guide. Yes, please and thank you I agreed, using my entire Czech vocabulary.
Dressed in a white raincoats and hardhats, we began our excursion. Glass cases held exhibits of miners' clothing. Elfin leather boots and child-size chainmail leggings made the point that the adult miners were tiny in stature, and the low-ceilinged caves further proved it. The silver mine tour of Kutná Hora is not for the claustrophobic.
Similar to my experience in the bony chapel, there was no going back. The caverns got progressively narrower to the point that my backpack bumped off the walls. My guide pointed down, down, down to a pale and creamy pool of greenish water. He explained a typical miner's week required six days of hard labor in pitch-black conditions, and each work day consisted of a fourteen-hour shift. Such a workload would cause great thirst, but it would be a terrible mistake to drink the water far below. Highly toxic, it would result in sure death.
Between the mad monks and tiny overworked miners, I was privately calling Kutná Hora...Kutná Horror.
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