Kutna Hora

On Friday all of the students in my program and our professors went on an all day field trip to a few different places in the Czech Republic. A bus came to pick us up at the pension at 9:00am and our first stop was an open air museum. This was a preserved historic village that gave us an idea of what it was like to live in the Czech Republic hundreds of years ago. They had a typical historic house, a school, a bee keeping shed, and several other farm buildings with a lot of old equipment. A lot of the rooms were also set up in scenes with mannequins doing things like eating dinner or listening in class. This was interesting but the best part about it was that they had several apple trees and we picked apples and they were pretty good.

After the open air museum we headed to Kutna Hora, a small town east of Prague. On the way we stopped in a small town called Sedlec to visit the Sedlec Ossuary, which is a bone church. There is a catholic church and a cemetery above ground and then the lower part of the church is decorated with 40,000-70,000 human skeletons from people who had died during the plague. We walked into the ossuary down a large staircase and into the large room were there was a chandelier, a coat of arms, and several challises all made out of bones as well as bones hanging everywhere to decorate the place. There were also four very large piles of bones with crowns hanging on top of them. I thought this place was really cool although every 10 minutes a new group of about 50 or more tourists would filter in and fill up the whole space. During the plague when people died the bones would just pile up outside of the church because they ran out of room to bury people. In the late 1800's an artist was asked to organize all of the piles of bones so he arranged them in this way and decorated the church.

After the bone church we had about two hours to get some lunch before we had to meet in front of a different church in the center of town. We ended up eating at the only restaurant in town that we could find and it was inside of a pension. After lunch we met our group at the church and then made our way to the old silver mines to take a tour. Our tour guide was an older man with a fake eye who had worked in the mines almost all of his life before retiring and now giving the tours. The mine is now closed due to flooding of most of the lower section. He told us about working in the mines and explained that is was pretty easy to get down into the mine by sliding down a ladder at the beginning of the day but usually it would take at least two hours at the end of day to climb back out. We went into a big room and put on white jackets and hard hats and we each got a flashlight. We were told not to go on the tour if you were claustrophobic because it is very narrow and low in many places. We then walked down a metal staircase that went very deep into the earth. When we came out we were inside of the mine and it was very damp and dark. Our guide led us through several very small mine shafts, most of the time you could only see the person in front of you and you had to walk sideways because it was so narrow. At one point we could look down and see one of the lower shafts that was filled with about 3 meters of water. After being in the mine for about 15 minutes we finally came out at the bottom of the hill. From here we walked around the town for a bit before getting back on the bus and heading back to Prague.