Kutna Hora

Kutna Hora is a small town outside of Prague known for its small chapel of bones, built into structures such as a chandelier using every kind of bone in the human body. It took us about an hour to get there by train, which I very much enjoyed, in part because the train we were on had compartments just like in the Harry Potter movies. Cool!

The bone statues were creepy and strange as expected. It also kind of smelled funky, and felt like hundred year old bone dust being breathed into my lungs. Which it probably was. But it was still interesting to see. It reminded me of the catacombs in Paris and the stacks of bones arranged there.

After that, we caught a ride into the main town and looked around the chapel up there. It was a magnificent view above the vineyards and gardens, and we descended into the town for lunch, where J and B both got huge meat platters, keeping with the local tastes. J also tried the local cola, Kofola, which has kind of a licorice taste to it, and while it wasn't thoroughly unpleasant, I can't say I understand the local obsession.

Lunch, visits to puppet shops and sampling the differences in European magnum bars (the vanilla ice cream is much richer, I'd say) behind us, we walked back toward the train station and visited what ended up being my favorite church, not because of how it looked necessarily, but of what it had in it.

They had a really interesting exhibit on how they restore art, with before and after pictures of the piece nearby the actual artwork. Sometimes it's really difficult to know how to correctly restore a piece, and a lot of talking and politics comes into the decision on what to do with a completely washed it section. A lot of it is also trial and error with what formulas are working to help the degregation. In the case of this particular work, the restoration actually uncovered another original painting underneath it, and they had to decide if they wanted to try to uncover the even older work instead of restoring the (still old but) newer one. They ended up restoring the newer one, but after the old one had been carefully photographed and recorded for further study.

They also opened the upper level to the public at this church, which was amazing. We were able to walk through the upper beams and look through one of the smaller windows outside of the church, as well as to stand on the balcony and look down. It was really cool to see the old stone as well as the new that had taken its place hundreds of years ago.

We caught our train back to Prague in time for J to catch the night bus after a nice dinner.