Human Bones

World�s most macabre chandelier ??

I once again happen to chance upon Architectural Classics .com's blog which has a new layout I really like. It's black and I really like the header.

But, what interests me most and captured my attention about the blog is their post last March21, 2007 posted by Lucy Atkinson. It tells about the Human Bones Chandelier.

Was it designed like a human bone? You might ask. Well, you could say that again. They said it is the most unusual chandelier in the world which can be found in an ossuary (a place where bones can be found) in Sedlec of what used to be Czechoslovakia which is now known as Czech Republic.

They have even nicknamed it as the "world's most macabre chandelier", since it contained not artificial bones or animal bones but REAL human bones.

The cemetery there in Sedlec at one time had some earth that came from Golgotha,which we all know from the Bible was the hill on top of which Christ was crucified, sprinkled on it. Soon, a lot of people from different parts of the world wanted to be buried there because of the earth from Golgotha and the cemetery outgrew it's original capacity.

The Gothics built a Church in the middle of the cemetery that was supposed to have a lower and upper level. Since, there were a bunch of dead people in the way of the lower level,according to the legend, they gave a task to a half-blind monk to exhume the bones and stack the bones in the chapel.

In the 1800's, the Schwarzenberg family have decided to employ František Rint, who was a woodcarver at that time, to put the bone heaps in some sort of order. He created four huge mounds of bones in bell shapes in each corner of the chapel, as well as an enormous chandelier of bones, which actually contains at least one of every bone in the human body.

Photo credits: Sedlec Ossuary pictures by the nixonator