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For the Coming Season--Sedlec Ossuary
In honor of the coming holiday, more dark links to the shadowy depths of the human mind. Ossuaries--treasure houses of bones--have a particularly macabre appearance to modern folk. Knowing little of history, some people across the Internet are showing off pictures and writing...oddly...about these storehouses of the dead.
This is why your teachers (all those good ones) kept talking about understanding history, and where things are placed in time and space.
This church, and its population, survived the Black Death. We're talking that in Europe? Half the population died. HALF. This church survived more than a few wars, some of them the monstrous, razing the populations down to the soil kind of conflicts. To the men who built this church, recognizing that death was where everyone ended up, and that Death was King, was not the stuff of story or a late night movie to scare yourself.
It was life.
This is a fairly respectful article, and shows a lot of the inside of the church. It doesn't show the huge piles of skulls and leg bones, with a gold crown poised above them, but you can find those elsewhere.
This is why your teachers (all those good ones) kept talking about understanding history, and where things are placed in time and space.
This church, and its population, survived the Black Death. We're talking that in Europe? Half the population died. HALF. This church survived more than a few wars, some of them the monstrous, razing the populations down to the soil kind of conflicts. To the men who built this church, recognizing that death was where everyone ended up, and that Death was King, was not the stuff of story or a late night movie to scare yourself.
It was life.
This is a fairly respectful article, and shows a lot of the inside of the church. It doesn't show the huge piles of skulls and leg bones, with a gold crown poised above them, but you can find those elsewhere.