Sedlec Ossuary (Bone Church)

Somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 dead people are decorating this chapel, and the effect is equal parts horrifying and beautiful. The Sedlec Ossuary — the "Bone Church" — sits beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Kutna Hora, about an hour east of Prague. Every surface is covered in human remains arranged with a craftsmanship that borders on the devotional: garlands of skulls drape from the ceiling, a chandelier contains at least one of every bone in the human body, and the Schwarzenberg coat of arms is rendered entirely in skeletal parts, complete with a raven pecking at a skull.

The bones started accumulating in 1278, when the Abbot of Sedlec returned from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and sprinkled soil from Golgotha over the cemetery. Word spread that this was now sacred ground, and suddenly everyone in Central Europe wanted to be buried here. The Black Death in the 14th century and the Hussite Wars in the 15th century delivered tens of thousands more bodies. By the 1400s, the cemetery was overflowing, and a Gothic chapel was built to house the exhumed remains.

For centuries, the bones just sat in piles. Then, in 1870, the Schwarzenberg family hired a woodcarver named Frantisek Rint to bring some order to the chaos. What Rint created was a masterpiece of macabre art — he bleached and arranged every bone with obsessive precision, signing his work with his name spelled out in bones near the entrance.

It's a day trip from Prague, but Kutna Hora itself — a UNESCO World Heritage Site built on medieval silver mines — is worth the detour. The ossuary draws over 200,000 visitors a year, making it one of the most popular tourist attractions in the Czech Republic.