Day 20

So the day prior we had explored a great deal of Prague and we probably would have spent the entire day in the city itself if our tour guide had not mentioned a small town 70 kilometers East of Prague called Kutna Hora.  In this town is a church called Kostnice which has a small cemetery around it.  In the 19 century there were far too many people buried there so the interior of the church was converted into an artistic mass grave for the bones of some 40,000 people.  That’s right we’re talking the ultimate Halloween style interior and while the concept is quite morbid it was still what we set out to see for ourselves.

We ended up traveling with two others from our group that were also hoping to see the church and in doing so got a group discount on the train tickets.  I wish via rail was like this as for our share a 75 km journey with return was only 10 Euros!  The trains themselves had interiors and structure the same as the Harry Potter movies so for Tracey and our companions the journey in itself was quite enjoyable.

From the train station in Kutna Hora it was only a 12 minute walk to the church and just under 3 Euros admission per person.  We were expecting a separate charge for a photography permit mentioned online but apparently that’s been included in the admission now.

The church itself was nothing short of amazing.  They had six massive pyramids of bones in separate rooms around the perimeter of the centre of the church.  In the centre of the church were four tall triangular prisms adorned with skulls and above them was a massive chandelier whose composition used every bone in the human body.  It’s six candle positions were each fitted with a skull on the end and above and around the chandelier were “streamers” of skulls and crossbones.  I really can’t say what the people of their day would think of their remains being displayed and honouring God in this way but I personally wouldn’t mind.

Leaving the church we were aiming for a 2pm train back to Prague and arrived at the station right around 1:30 to make sure we caught it.  Unfortunately it turned out the ticket office lady earlier had just been scribbling some arbitrary numbers on a pad of paper to get rid of us when we had inquired earlier and the next train was not in fact due to arrive until 3pm.  There being no sense in arguing we chose to partake in lunch and arrived in Prague right around 4pm.

Now we could’ve gone to the zoo or some other attraction but the pressing matter at the time was a lack of clean clothes so we returned to the hostel to do laundry (quite the party goers we are eh?).  Laundry itself did have some mentionable interest as we encountered the dryer that doesn’t dry.  Our single load of clothes was put through twice and we still needed to hang it to dry (we had to pay twice too).

After laundry was taken care of, we went out for dinner with some of the group. We were going to pick a place to eat near the hostel- a taco place or a steakhouse. We ended up at the taco place and Matt had a steak :) I had tacos so we kind of had the best of both restaurants. We hung out there for a little bit and made our way back to the hostel (after stopping for icecream and ending up with a bottle of sangria instead). After that was just getting dressed and ready for sleep.