More from Kutna Hora

Tom always insists on taking photos of me, and I usually delete them, but I guess I'll leave this one.


yes Erika- I'm wearing a floral sweater!!

As we were walking through the town, we heard a cacophony of bird sounds. It took a while to spot the source of the noise, but when we did, we found a nest of some sort of raptor. We couldn't tell if they were hawks or falcons, but the young ones were just about to try to fly. They were coming to the edge of this opening, looking down, squawking, and quickly moving back to the safety of the interior. We didn't see any of them take wing, but I am sure that it happened later that day!

Detail of flying buttresses on the church of St. Barbara - patron saint of miners.

Pretty!

Lots of old stone walls in this town...

Of course, no visit to Kutna Hora is complete without a stop at the "bone church". This church is actually located in a neighboring area, so we stopped there on our way home.

It's hard to imagine the numbers of people who have lived and died in Europe- thousands alone in the plague years in the 1300s, not to mention wars, natural disasters, and old age :-). What to do with all the bodies? Sometimes, the bones from previous burials were collected and housed in the crypts of churches. These are known as carnal houses or ossuaries.

Someone went a little too far with this one- besides the stacking of bones from about 40,000 individuals, bones were used to create macabre decorations for the room.

That chandelier contains every bone in the human body - not sure if you can see it clearly here.

This is a recreation of the coat of arms of one of the families responsible for this ossuary. Made from bones, of course.