Birth of an Ossuary
Let’s now turn back the pages of the history book of Sedlec… In 1142, a Cistercian Monastery was founded in this area. Then, in 1278, Henry, a Cistercian abbot traveled to Jerusalem and brought back soil from Golgotha, of the Holy Land. Word quickly spread, and the requests poured in for people wanting to be buried at the Sedlec cemetery. In 1400, the construction of a progressive gothic style charnel-house, The Cemetery Church of All Saints, began. Curiously, it was not sponsored by the local church or town, but by the Cistercian Order.
The Hussite War and Black Plague that followed, filled the cemetery to capacity. Many of the sick and wounded traveled from far away lands to be buried at Sedlec. In 1511, to free up space for burials, legend has it that a half-blind monk started moving bones into an ossuary (or a container or room into which the bones of dead people are placed) in the basement of the church, and arranged them into pyramids/piles.
Then from 1703–1710, the charnel-house was remodeled in the Baroque style by the famous Czech architect of Italian origin, Jan Blažej Santini. In 1783, the original Cistercian monastery was abolished, as Emperor Josef II ordered hundreds of monasteries to be sold off so he could establish Catholic church control over the region. It was at this time that the abbey was purchased by the Schwartzenberg family of Orik.
From 1867–1870, the House of Schwarzenberg of Bohemia hired a woodcarver by the name of František Rint to rearrange the bones in the ossuary. The only known information about him is that he was a wood carver and designer by trade, and originated from the town of Ceska Skalice near the Polish/Czech border. During this time, Rint lived at the ossuary with his family, and never left until his work on the interior decorations were complete. Rint bleached and re-purposed the human remains from two of the six pyramids built by the half-blind monk, for his own sculptures that decorate the ossuary, and kept the remaining four pyramids in their original arrangement. And then in the style of a true artist, he signed his name and home town, written in bones, on the ossuary wall. Most of his original work at Sedlec is what we see and recognize today.
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