Frisco's Kutna Hora Page:
In the year of the Lord 1278 the Cistercian abbot Henry embarked on a pilgrim voyage to the Holy Land...
While in Palestine abbot Henry visited the Golgotha and from there he brought back to Sedlec a jar full of earth. He referred to this as Holy Soil. When he got back he spread the earth over the Sedlec cemetery and thus the cemetery begun to be considered a piece of sacred land. The burial ground rapidly became one of the most popular in central Europe and people from all over the country and Europe came to Sedlec to get buried when they felt the strength of life diminishing... Many corpses and bones were accumulated this way and especially during the times of the plague many who were about to die from the disease came themselves to be buried in Sedlec. By 1318, over 30000 bodies were buried there and this gave rise to the creation of the ossuary.
The ossuary is located in the All Saints' Chapel built around 1400. The chapel is still surrounded by a functioning graveyard and if you take a careful look at the top of its towers you will see that that a skull and crossbones replace the usual Christian cross. The ossuary itself dates from 1511 when a half-blind monk was given the task to gather the bones from the abolished graves and put them in the crypt to make place for new burials. The task may seem somewhat macabre and unenviable but it served a practical purpose. Anyhow - now the material was in store and waiting for an idea and someone to realize that idea.
A more questionable task than the one of the half-blind monk was the one of the local woodcarver who as late as 1870 was hired to decorate the inside of the Chapel with the human material at his disposal. The name of the artist was Frantisek Rindt and the employer was the Duke of Shwartzenberg. The coats of arms of the family Shwartzenberg was one of the creations evolved from the artist's mind. Another is the chandelier which contains every human bone in the body - several times over, of course.