Our field trip today was to UNESCO town Kutna Hora, famous for silver mining and gothic churches. Our first stop was the Sedlec Ossuary. A Cistercian monastery established a Catholic church here in 1142. A century later, one monk brought soil from the Holy Land and spread it in the cemetery, so many people wanted to be buried here — including victims of the Hussite wars and plague. When it got too crowded, the bones of 40,000 people were exhumed stored in an ossuary church building (which was a normal, respectful storage method at the time). In 1870, an artist was hired to arrange the bones, resulting in the display there today. It was astonishing! On the one hand, we were looking at towers of bones (including skulls) from thousands of people who died years ago — people who cared about their wealth and looks, but were now preserved anonymously. It was a dark reminder of mortality, equality, and what lasts physically. On the other hand, it was a captivating opportunity to recognize the body parts and recall how they fit together — a living anatomy textbook. For example, I noticed teeth in mandibles, wide curving scapulas, hard spongy interiors of broken bones, and the smooth round ball-and-socket hip joints protruding like brussel sprouts from their femurs.
This visit was an unusual, “fish out of water” experience because I had never seen anything like it. (There’s the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, but those displays are for medical science, while the Sedlec Ossuary was a religious monument to the deceased.) I felt an odd juxtaposition of feelings when admiring the human bone display.
Swanson School of Engineering 