2010 Trip: Kutna Hora & To Konstanz
26th May 2010
Today I tiptoed around my dorm at 8am. It seems that most travellers tend to like drinking until 4 and sleeping till 11, which is slightly at odds with my usual timetable! I sorted my stuff out as quietly as possible and headed across town (by tram and underground) to the main station. Here I left my bags, grabbed breakfast, brought tickets, and did all the usual train station type stuff.
I caught the train west, towards the middle of Czech, to a town called Kutna Hora, famous primarily for an ossuary (the building in a graveyard, usually attached to a monastery - though more generally something that holds skeletal remains). Just over an hour later, when I hoped off the train, the weather was slightly inclement (surprise, surprise).
I wandered about a kilometre through the town to the cathedral built as a part of this important Cistercian chapter house, while very plainly decorated, it was very beautiful with clean lines and long colonnades. They had a very pretty set of spiral staircases that were partially housed inside an arch (by now, you may have guessed, I like spiral staircases) and the church (now museum) also allowed access into the roof space. This was rather cool as one could look down over the domes that made up the church below. The tombs of two saints in glass cabinets, bones sewn to the outside of their fine robes, foreshadowed what I would see next.
From here, I crossed the road and headed for the ossuary. A fairly uninspired Gothic structure, surrounded by a small graveyard, packed with gravestones. In the thirteenth century, a knight from one of the crusades had returned to the area with some dirt. He sprinkled it over this area and low and behold the area was suddenly holy and would make one’s path to heaven easier.
In an overnight success story, suddenly thousands of people wanted to be buried here (one year with accurate records, 1318, details that 30,000 people were buried here that year alone). This was slightly problematic, so like several other sites in Europe, they decided that the best option would be to dig up those who had been buried long enough and stack their bones inside the ossuary. Many years later and even after the number of bones have been culled (lol) many times, huge piles of bones still remain.
Over the years, monks who have looked after the ossuary occasionally decided it would be a good idea to make cool stuff with the bones. The latest artist, from 1870, decorated the ossuary with chains of skull and crossbones, a huge macabre chandelier that hangs from the roof, a coat of arms, light fittings, a crucifix, and his own signature, with the best preserved parts of your anatomy. Apparently, it has long been a tourist site - not surprisingly. Slightly more disturbingly, however, is that visitors used to take home a bone or two as souvenirs (as recently as the 1950s).
From here, I walked the remaining 3.5km into the centre of town (a strangely long town for such a small population). I didn’t have a huge amount of time here and I really had had enough of museums, so after grabbing some pasta for lunch (with some of the local brew), I attached myself to a tour of the local silver mine. Well, they have long since stopped, but many years ago the entire area was riddled with mines. It made the town quite wealthy and it became a centre of coinage for the Holy Roman Empire. The tour was for a Czech school group (16-17 year olds) and I was the only foreigner, I created much amusement as the guide (a 70+ year old man who one might imagine would have taught Latin 30 years ago) would proceed to provide a brief translation for me after speaking to the rest of the group.
We looked at the hands-on approach, in near darkness, that the miners endured, the huge horse driven pulley systems that would raise material from the bottom of the mine shafts, pump systems to remove water from flooded tunnels, and even the sorting and smelting processes. All very interesting. We then got to don white lab coats and construction helmets and head down into a recently discovered mine.
After heading down 187 steps (fairly shallow, this one), we proceeded through often narrow (30-40cm) and usually short (sometimes as little as 1.2m high) tunnels. Being rather tall in stature, I often ended up doubled over with my helmet still scraping on the ceiling. Brilliant blue water filled exploratory mine shafts and stalactites have began to grow from the ceiling. Here and there, patches of moss starkly contrasted the rock. No one seemed to notice, but here cave spiders dwelled, they were actually the most interesting part of the tour. Our guide told us amusing anecdotes. Apparently, one woman on leaving the mine had remarked that she had lost one of her breasts somewhere along the way.
From here, after passing a political rally (elections are this coming weekend), I caught the bus back to the station, the train to Kolin, swapped onto a train to Prague and got back with enough time to spare (I was a little worried, the train I had planned to catch just decided not to show up, but luckily the next one did).
Lenka met me at the station to see me off and I caught the very long (in duration - 14:47 hrs and number of carriages - 14) ‘City Night Line’ train to Zurich. For those who don’t know, there is a very useful (if not particularly cheap) system of sleeper trains that permeate through Europe every evening. They have carriages for different destinations and the trains casually split and join at different stations so that everyone ends up at their required destination - quite clever really.
I ended up in a cabin with three friends (of each other, that is) from Leeds, who were travelling around Europe for a few weeks after two of them had finished a year of French abroad. We sped through the Czech and then German countryside, through the wooded countryside, with huge limestone pillars. I went to sleep sometime soon after Dresden…