Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic

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Here's an incredibly painstaking, ridiculously intricate piece of art.
The Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech republic is probably one of the weirdest, most insane works of art. Imagine one part sculpture, and one part mausoleum.


Built from the skeletons of between 40,000 to 70,000 people, the arrangements within the Sedlec Ossuary defy imagination. A Woodcarver named Frantisek Rint, was hired to give order to the massive amount of human remains that had been exhumed after a push to reconstruct the holy ground around a Gothic church in the town of Sedlec.
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The bones used in this fantastic macabre wonder had once been the property of hundreds of thousands of people that had died in the mid 14th century due to the Black Death.


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These awesome original photos came from Curious Expeditions Photoset on Flickr.
There are more amazing photos
here if you'd like to see more!
There are 33 great ones in total in the set.


And, if you'd like to know more history behind this place, more images and content can be found at
SedlecOssuary.com

1 comment:

  1. I just read about this place a few weeks ago when I was looking at this list of links to "creepy" Wikipedia pages (it was a forum post on IGN boards - I'll give a link later in this message). Apparently Jan Svankmajer (Czech filmmaker, makes weird surreal stop-motions) was commissioned by the government to make a short documentary film about the ossuary. The results were kinda funny (look under the "Media" section):

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary

    And here is the creepy wikipedia pages list:

    http://boards.ign.com/teh_vestibule/b5296/186726473/p1

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