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CZ.2

Tuesday morning, we caught a train to Kutne Hora, about an hour's ride southeast of Prague in Bohemia, billed as a typical Czech town. There, we toured the Church of St. Barbara, which took over 500 years to complete. St. Barbara was the patron saint of miners and other people who die without a priest present to perform their last rites.Speaking of miners, Kutne Hora was once home to a huge silver mine and we took a tour of it. We had a precious Czech tour guide who was very entertaining and seemed to really love his job. He seemed pretty excited to use his English and tried to make us laugh a lot. You have to have a very specialized lexicon to give a silver mine tour in another language. We donned our miner's coats and hard hats and descended 500 feet into the centuries old mine. It was super-cool (literally and figuratively) and an altogether unique experience.We walked around and saw some of the other sites in town, like St. James' Church, the Stone House and an old, now defunct dodecahedron water fountain. Then we headed to the Sedlec Ossuary. Ossuary meaning a receptacle for the burial of human bones. This particular ossuary was also a Catholic chapel. Legend has it a cleric brought some dirt back from the Holy Land and sprinkled it on the grounds and therefore everyone wanted to be buried there. So many people that there was a frequent, high turnover of graves and a pile of bones amassed at the chapel. After many years, the (a?) monks decided to use the bones to decorate the chapel, in order to remind people of their mortality. Certainly one of the uniquest things I've ever seen. Not to mention that there was what appeared to be a photo shoot for some death metal singer, covered in black face paint, going on while we were there. Rather unsettling.We headed back to the train station around 4 and waited quite awhile to catch the train back to Prague. And for dinner, Kate and Garrett took me to a wonderfully tasty Indian restaurant that was full of ex-pats.Onto Vienna for a day or two...

Labels: travel

posted by CP @ 5:32 PM 0 thoughts