Today we got up and tried to get on a train at a relatively early hour to go to the town of Kutna Hora, a UNESCO World Heritage site about an hour from Prague, and home to a few really neat places.
To be fair, we did make it on the train at a reasonable hour… and then we proceeded to not only miss our stop, but overshoot it by about a half hour. Then we had to sit and wait at some train station in the boonies for the next train to show up, and then we had to go a half hour back. As a result, it was almost 1PM by the time we finally got to Kutna Hora. WHOOPS.
The #1 reason we wanted to go to Kutna Hora was to see the bone church (Sedlec Ossuary) there. If you’ve been reading along for a while, you might remember that we went to a bone church in Rome last fall, and since I heard about this one, I’ve wanted to see it, since it’s supposed to be much bigger than the one in Rome. It was… but it had a different feel, for some reason. I really liked how the one in Rome had murals, whereas this one mostly had nicely arranged piles. Still, there was some really neat stuff, and I totally enjoyed it. Here are all of the pictures I took with my phone, if you’re curious… eventually I’ll get the ones from my “real” camera put up, as I’m sure they came out much better.
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Afterwards we walked across the street to the Cathedral of Our Lady, a medieval Gothic cathedral that got Baroqued and then mostly un-Baroqued. It’s really interesting because of its style — it’s VERY plain and simple, but instead of having plain stone walls inside like most Gothic cathedrals, it has pale yellow plastered walls. It’s a very light, airy, open, beautiful church, and the light that streamed in through the mostly plain glass windows was absolutely gorgeous. I can’t wait to process the pics I took with my regular camera, and I had a ton of fun just using the cameraphone.

South (I think) aisle of the cathedral. I'm pretty sure it's the south aisle because the altar is at my back, and most cathedrals were built with the altar at the east end and the main door at the west end. Clearly I've spent way too long reading about cathedral architecture. Maybe it's time to go reread "Pillars of the Earth".
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As I was upstairs in the balcony, checking out the view from up there, I heard chanting start… apparently there are still monks there. COOL.
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After that, we wandered around town for a while and eventually made our way to St. Barbara Church, yet another Gothic church, this one of the super ornate classical Gothic variety. It was really neat, not only because of the architecture, but because a fair amount of the 14th century paint on the stone pillars and frescoes were still intact. SO NEAT.

The ceiling of the crossing and the apse (area over the altar) was covered with crests of various guilds and noble families from the town. Neat!
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Incidentally, notice those arch things on the church behind us? Those are flying buttresses, and every time I think of the term “flying buttresses”, I think of Cogsworth in the Disney version of “Beauty and the Beast”, where he’s showing Belle around the castle and talking about architecture and makes the “if it ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it” joke. Anyway, go rewatch the movie if you can’t remember what I’m talking about. Flying buttresses.
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As it crept toward sunset, we hopped a train back home, and had a nice Chinese food dinner before crashing for the night.
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Where we are now:
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