Happy New Year Everyone!
Now I know that my Berlin post was quite a few weeks ago but don't worry I haven't forgotten about the rest of the cities that I visited on my Contiki tour. I plan to in the next two weeks give you all a taste of the places that I went to through the photos that I took there.
So to pick up where we left off I was heading out of Germany and into the Czech Republic. Before I tell you all about my stop in Prague I wanted to tell you about our other stop which was at the Bone Church or Kostnice in Kutna Hora. Yes you heard me right a bone church as in a church which inside is decorated entirely with human bones. It is said that the church contains the skeletons of more than 40 000 people and is definitely a strange thing to experience.
After the Black Death mid 14th Century and the Hussite Wars in the early 15th Century there were thousands of bodies buried at this Roman Catholic Chapel. In the 1400s a Gothic church was built in the cemetery to act as a ossuary to house the remains that had been unearthed during construction. Once all the bones had been exhumed the job of sorting and stacking the remains was given to a half-blind monk. Some say that the monk was not entirely sane from spending days on end sorting bones that he began to arrange the bones into patterns and create objects such as a chandelier out of them. Whether he was sane or not we do not know but the skeletons are indeed arranged in an artistic way that most people would probably not have thought of and if you are ever in the area it is well worth a look.
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