Key facts

• Sedlec Ossuary (Bone Church, c.1400; decorated 1870): the most visited attraction in the Czech Republic outside Prague and the most extraordinary funerary space in the world — the Cistercian monastery at Sedlec (2 km north of Kutná Hora centre) was established in 1142; the Black Death and the Hussite Wars left the monastery cemetery overflowing with corpses, and around 1400 the bones of approximately 40,000–70,000 people were stacked in the lower chapel of the All Saints Church (Kostel Všech Svatých) above the Sedlec Ossuary; in 1870 the wood-carver František Rint was commissioned by the Schwarzenberg family (landowners of the area) to arrange the bones into artistic compositions; Rint created a chandelier of bones (using every bone in the human body at least once), four pyramid-shaped towers of skulls and femurs stacked to the ceiling in the corners of the chapel, garlands of skulls festooning the arches, and — most remarkably — the coat of arms of the Schwarzenberg family rendered entirely in bone (a femur raven pecking at a skull); the effect is simultaneously macabre, devotional, and extraordinarily aesthetic; the Ossuary is heavily visited (book tickets online to avoid queues) and requires approximately 45 minutes
• Cathedral of St Barbara (Chrám svaté Barbory, begun 1388): the most ambitious and original Gothic cathedral in Bohemia after St Vitus in Prague and the culminating monument of Bohemian Gothic architecture — begun in 1388 by Jan Parler (son of Peter Parler, the architect who built St Vitus Cathedral in Prague) on the commission of the silver-mining burgher class of Kutná Hora (who dedicated it to St Barbara, the patron of miners) as a deliberate architectural rival to the royal cathedral; the building was interrupted by the Hussite Wars and the depletion of the silver mines and not completed until 1905; the most striking features: the tent-roofed flying buttresses (each buttress is capped with a small tent roof — a detail unique in Gothic architecture) and the three tent-roofed chapel projections on the north side of the nave that give the cathedral its distinctive silhouette when seen from the south across the valley; the interior contains late-Gothic frescoes of miners and their tools (15th century, in the choir ambulatory) that are among the most important documentary images of medieval mining technology; the Jesuit College (1667–1700, immediately adjacent to the cathedral on the promontory above the valley, the longest Baroque building façade in Bohemia) frames the approach from the south
• Italian Court (Vlašský dvůr, 1300–1400): the royal palace of the Bohemian kings and the mint of the Prague Groschen — the “Italian Court” was so named for the Italian craftsmen (florentine financiers and mint-masters) who operated the silver mint beginning in 1300; the Prague Groschen (a thick silver coin, 3.7 g, minted at the Italian Court from 1300 to 1547) was the most widely circulated silver coin in Central Europe for 200 years, used from Poland to France; King Wenceslas IV of Bohemia (1378–1419) used the Italian Court as his royal residence in preference to Prague; the building was reconstructed in Neo-Gothic style in the 1890s but retains two original late-Gothic spaces: the Chapel of St Wenceslas (with 15th-century wall paintings of the passion of St Wenceslas) and the Royal Audience Hall (used for the election of the Bohemian diet)
• Church of Our Lady at Sedlec (1290–1320; rebuilt 1702–1707): the first Gothic church in Bohemia and a masterwork of Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel’s extraordinary “Bohemian Gothic Baroque” (also known as Santini’s Baroque or Baroque Gothic) — the original Cistercian church (1290–1320, the first Gothic church built in Bohemia, which served as the model for the Gothic churches of the Premonstratensian Order throughout Bohemia) was severely damaged in the Hussite Wars; Santini-Aichel (Giovanni Blasius Santini-Aichel, 1677–1723, the most original architect of Bohemia’s Baroque period) rebuilt it between 1702 and 1707 by overlaying the medieval Gothic structure with Baroque spatial geometry and plaster ornament, creating a haunting fusion of pointed Gothic ribs and Baroque oval chapels that has no parallel in European architecture; Santini used the same Gothic-Baroque synthesis in several Bohemian monasteries (Kladruby, Zelená Hora near Žďár nad Sázavou — the latter UNESCO WHS 1994) but nowhere so strikingly as at Sedlec
• Silver mining heritage: the Kutná Hora silver mines (in the hills between the town and Kaňk, 2 km north-east) were the richest silver deposits in Europe in the 14th century and the primary source of the Bohemian kings’ wealth; the “Hrádek” (the former castle of the Smíšek family, now the Czech Silver Museum) includes access to a real medieval mine shaft: visitors don miner’s suits and descend with a guide approximately 12 metres underground to walk through the original 14th-century mining galleries (the single most interesting museum experience in Kutná Hora, approximately 1.5 hours; book ahead)
• Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage Site, Historic Centre of Kutná Hora with the Church of Our Lady at Sedlec, inscribed 1995
• GPS: 49.9481° N, 15.2680° E