Kostnice v českých zemích – (2019)

Despite common awareness, ossuaries are a regular part of our cultural landscape and were once found in almost every cemetery. While today most of us envision monumental and widely known ossuaries, such as the ossuary in Sedlec near Kutná Hora, there are many ossuaries whose original function—storing human skeletal remains, especially during periods of mass deaths—has long been forgotten, and these small sacred buildings served as morgues or storage facilities. Recently, however, interest in them has been rising, and some sites have been restored and opened to the public. This publication is the first comprehensive attempt to showcase their diversity in book form. It presents over 150 locations from various corners of our republic, arranged alphabetically. The individual ossuaries are placed in the historical context of the municipalities and church districts to which they usually belong. Information about other funerary monuments and the history of burial in the respective municipalities is also included, and in a comprehensive introductory chapter, our ossuaries are situated within broader cultural-historical and ethnological contexts. The book is supplemented with numerous photographs of the individual sites, including often...