Reality Czech!

Reality Czech!

Prague, here I come I declared once I booked a studio apartment for three days and two nights in the city’s Old Town section. Next, I researched to see how much I could accomplish during my stay without being gluttonous. Usually, I cover quite a bit on my trips by being organized, through prioritizing, doing my research ahead of time and booking accommodations located conveniently. During my research, by chance, on one of the Travel Channel shows, I heard of a place called Kutna Hora near Prague and the Bone Church in the nearby Sedlec, a 14th century royal city and a one-time, silver mining town that minted much of Europe’s coinage. Kutna Hora was an hour southeast of Prague by train. Ideal I thought because this would allow me to return to Prague in the afternoon and see the castle. I could not resist my desire to visit this town and what I called, the reality-check church there. When I told my husband my plan, his reaction was: a bone church? That’s gross!

I came from a family where songs that proclaimed life’s impermanence were celebrated as a reminder to know one’s true purpose in life: attaining moksha, that is, liberation from life’s endless birth-death cycle. One of my own favorite poems is, Percy B. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” which again is a reminder of life’s ultimate reality.

I decided to take the 8 a.m. direct train from Praha hlavní nádraží, Prague’s main station. We chose to walk from our apartment. But it was raining, yet I was in no mood to wait for a tram or get into a cab that would have to follow numerous traffic regulations and thus take longer than my legs would. Wind-like, I took off in the direction of the nádraží and after I reached the station I realized my husband was nowhere in sight. How typical! I thought. I tried texting him but to no avail. The clock ticked away. But miraculously, seven minutes before 8, I spotted him, his back turned toward me and head bent down and fingers punching away on his phone. We reconnected, dashed to the ticket office, purchased our round trip, zipped through the station, spotted the right entry point, swiped through the turn style and got on the train. Whew!

Behind us was another couple. The four of us sat together, introduced ourselves, and chatted away the entire hour. Of Chinese origin, our new friends were from Singapore. We took turns photographing each other, then critiqued and admired the photos, laughed all the way and exchanged email ids. They too liked travel. When we parted company we joked  we would plan our next trip together. I learned a great deal about them and the people of Singapore. My travel focus is not just places but people, too–one reason, why we usually rent an apartment. This forces us to visit local markets, which in turn compels us to learn a few new words from the local language and mingle with the natives. We also seek out well-reviewed, quaint restaurants off the beaten track.

The church–actually a chapel nestled beneath the All Saints Cemetery Church built around year 1400, which, along with the close by Cathedral of our Lady at Sedlac (sporting Europe’s only Baroque-Gothic architecture)–is part of a 12th century Cistercian Monastery (closed in 1783 and now a part of it, a tobacco museum), a first of its kind in Bohemia. In medieval times, to be buried in the All Saints Cemetery was considered sacred. Thirty-thousand bodies from the 1380 plague found a home here.

One enters the chapel with the solemness reserved for a holy place. You descend a few steps into a womb-like structure and what awaits you is breathtaking and surreal. True to its name, nothing but skulls and bones. The chandeliers and the columns, the walls and the nave, the niches and the arches, the chalice and the candelabra, the monstrance and wall hangings and the pyramids inside four corner iron cages are skulls (some bullet hole-ridden) and bones from 40, 000 human skeletons–30, 000 from the plague and 10, 000 soldiers’ from the Hussite wars (1419-circa 1434). A 1511 ossuary turned an 1870 architectural wonder.

Apparently,  the choice of “building material” for this church was to “impress upon the public the shortness of life and how important it is to live in harmony.”

The town itself, with its friendly people, hilly, crooked cobble-stoned streets and other UNESCO heritage sites like the 14th century St. Barbara’s Cathedra beckons a visitor to return again and again and even buy a second home here if you have the dough. No matter. I still feel grateful to have had the opportunity to visit Sedlec, a place filled with both profound questions and profound answers.

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