Kutná Hora

Silver was found here in the 13th century, and within decades Kutná Hora had become one of the richest towns in the Bohemian kingdom. The Italian Court housed the royal mint that struck the Prague groschen, a coin used widely across Central Europe, and the town's prosperity funded ambitious building.

Work on St Barbara's began in 1388, probably under Johann Parler, son of the great Prague cathedral builder; it stalled during the Hussite Wars and resumed in 1481 under Matěj Rejsek and Benedikt Ried, who created its famous vault. When the silver mines ran out in the mid-16th century the town declined and the church was only completed in 1905. At Sedlec, the Cistercian abbey's cemetery became a sought-after burial place after an abbot brought back soil from Golgotha in 1278, and plague and war burials filled it; the bones were later moved into the ossuary chapel and arranged in decorative forms, including the Schwarzenberg coat of arms of around 1870. The historic centre, St Barbara's and the Cathedral of Our Lady at Sedlec were inscribed by UNESCO in 1995.

Kutná Hora remains a lively regional town, proud of its mining past; the patron saint of miners still watches over it from St Barbara's, and the town hall occupies the old royal mint. The Ossuary is a functioning Roman Catholic church where masses are held, and the parish asks visitors to treat it as a place of rest for the dead and of reflection on mortality, rather than as a curiosity.