In 1278 Henry the Cistercian abbot was sent to the Holy Land in Palestina. He brought back a jar of earth from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the place where Jesus was crucified at Golgotha.
He sprinkled it over the abbey cemetery. The rumor about his act soon spread out all over the place and thus Sedlec became a desired place to be buried.
In the mid 14th century, during the Black Death, and after the Hussite Wars in the early 15th century, many thousands were buried in the abbey cemetery.
In 1870 a local woodcarver Frantisek Rindt was given the task by the Schwarzenberg family to put over 40.000 bones into order yielding a macabre result.
Big chandelier of bones contains at least one of every human bone.
Coat of arms of the Schwarzenberg family.
Some bones from ossuary located in St. James church in Brno
The anthropological analyses carried out so far have shown that the bones of the victims of mediaeval plague and cholera epidemics, as well as those of the Thirty Years´ War and Swedish sieges were placed in the ossuary.
