Prague Pictures by John Banville

Author:John Banville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

16 Kutna Hora lies some seventy kilometres east of Prague. The ossuary is situated a short way outside the town, in the Chapel of All Saints - it flies a flag sporting a skull and crossbones - dating from around 1400. The cemetery was a popular burial place, after a Cistercian abbot returning from the Crusades had spread a layer of soil from the Holy Land over it, and by the 1500s it had become so crowded that a Cistercian monk was given the task of disinterring the old residents to make way for new applicants. He gathered some 40,000 skeletons. Nearly four centuries later, in 1870, a local woodcarver, Rindt, was hired, on who knows what ecclesiastical whim, to employ the bones to decorate the inside of All Saints. The result is one of the Czech Republic's more grisly tourist attractions. The centrepiece of the ossuary is a full-sized, working chandelier made from bones. There are bone crucifixion scenes, bone portraits, and a bone coat of arms of the Schwartzenberg family, featuring, if I am not confusing my images, a bone raven plucking a bone eye - a ball joint - from the head of a bone Turk. Not surprisingly, the great Czech animator, Jan Svankmajer, made a short film on the subject, in black and white, featuring a lively jazz score. The Bone Chapel is a place of horrible fascination, and should be pulled down and given a decent burial.

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