Sedlec Bone Church

Have you seen the very calcerous Sedlec Bone Church in the Czech Republic, decorated with the bones of 40,000 people? I was fascinated when I first discovered it. Until the advent of the 'New Cemeteries' in the early 19th century, people used to be buried in churchyards and under the flagstones of churches - apparently the decomposing corpses could create quite a stink too! When a churchyard got too full, bodies would be removed and the bones either chucked into a charnel house, or sometimes, as in this case, made into fetching decorative arrangements. As I said in a previous post, the ancinet Romans were really puzzled at the early Christian habit of bringing corpses or bits of bodies into their holy spaces - as 'relics' - as the Romans would never have brought death inside the House of the God. You can see in the Sedlec church, the corpse-in-church habit taken to the extreme. What a morbid religion!