The Most Famous 3 Religious Places Built From Bones And Human Skulls

 Today's article will be according to what one of the readers requested, and it is a continuation of a previous article in the same context.

In this article, we will discuss some churches and temples that were built from the bones of the dead, hundreds of them, if not thousands of the dead.

Are you ready, my friend, because we will travel to different places to get to know these places?

Let's start our journey...............

The first trip to the Chapel of Bones in Portugal:

• The Chapel of Bones is one of the most well-known monuments in Évora, Portugal. It is an indoor chapel next to the St. Francis Church entrance. The church gets its name because the interior walls are covered and decorated with human skulls and bones.

• Considered one of the most terrifying tourist and religious shrines of all, it is the final home of more than 5,000 human skeletons that were exhumed from graves in the 16th century to make way for the burial of new bodies.

• Instead of being buried elsewhere, skeletons, including skulls, were poured into cement blocks that decorate this church, which is not the only one in the world, but it is the most terrifying in Portugal, especially in Evora.

• The area of the Church of the Bones in Portugal is not large and can be toured in only 15 minutes, but it finds a lot of popularity despite the uncontrollable chills when you look face to face in the eyes of thousands of human skulls, which were stacked with great respect between the columns with a distinctive coordination that makes you confused between admiration them and terrifies them.

• Also, the location of the church itself is very picturesque and impressive on top of a hill that enjoys wonderful landscapes with many restaurants and services around it, which makes the trip there combine more than one pleasure, whether a religious or historical visit or even enjoying special meals in the middle of nature.

• The Bones Chapel was built in the century by a Franciscan friar who, in the Counter-Reformation zeitgeist of the age, wanted to exhort his fellow brethren to contemplation and convey a message of life being fleeting, a very popular spiritual theme summed up in the motto of the memorial of death. This is clearly seen in the famous warning at the entrance: Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos. ("We are the bones here because we are waiting for you," or, more poetically, "We are the bones, in this case, the eyes see us, for you sitting waiting").

• The church consists of three squares, 18.7 meters long and 11 meters wide. The light enters through three small slits on the left. Its walls and eight columns are adorned with carefully arranged bones and skulls cemented with mortar. The ceiling is of whitewashed brick and painted with motive motifs. The number of skeletons of monks has been calculated to be around 5,000, coming from tombs that were located inside dozens of churches. Some of these skulls have been scribbled with drawings. Two desiccated corpses, one of them a child, in glass cases. On the roof of the church, the phrase “Melior est die mortis die nativitatis” (Ecclesiastes 7, 1) from the Vulgate is written.

• Inside the Chapel of Bones, there is a poem about having to think about one's existence hanging in an old wooden frame on one of the columns. attributed to the father. Antonio da Ascenço Telles was a parish priest in the village of São Pedro (where the Church of St. Francis was built with the Chapel of Bones) from 1845 to 1848.

• The Church of the Bones in Portugal is not the only church that includes the bones, but it is one of many. The beginning was in the Church of Sedlic in the Czech Republic.

And from here we go on the second trip.

The second trip to Sedlec Church in the Czech Republic:

• It is a Roman Catholic church located under the All Saints' Cemetery Church as part of the Celtic Monastery. It is an ancient, abnormal church located 70 kilometers east of the capital of the Czech Republic, Paragoy County, in the city of Sedlec.

• It is estimated that most of them contain skeletons belonging to people estimated to be between 40,000 to 70,000 people, and these bones were used as decorations and furniture inside the church. The site is one of the most visited tourist destinations in the Czech Republic, with an average of 200,000 visitors annually, and about 450,000 people visited the site in 2018.

• The date of its construction, as Henry - the monk of the Benedictine Monastery in Sedlec - was sent to the Holy Land by King Octar II of Bohemia in 1278. Upon his return, he brought with him a quantity of soil from the land of Golgotha in Jerusalem (meaning the land of Adam's skull, on which the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great built the Church of the Resurrection 326-335).

• The monk scattered dirt on the tombs of the monks. This custom spread and the Sedlec tombs became an attraction for all of Europe. During the black plague pandemic that caused the death of at least a third of Europe's population between 1347-1352  and after the Bohemian Wars (which is the first European war in which gunpowder was used between 1420-1434 ) thousands were killed and burned, and the Sedlec tombs had to expand.

• At the beginning of the fifteenth century, a Gothic church was built amid the tombs with a vaulted upper floor and a lower church to be used as an ossuary for the bones that were excavated during the excavation of the foundations of the building and to be a room for new graves. After 1511, the task of excavating the great structures and piling the bones in the church was entrusted to a half-blind priestly monk.

• In 1870 Frantisek Rent, a wood carver, was employed to arrange the bones in the church, and the results of his work came as shown in the pictures.

The third trip to the Temple of Skulls in Poland:

• This church is located in a small town called “Chermna”. From the outside, this church looks like any ordinary church in Poland, but once you enter, you will be surprised by a horrific, chilling sight. This church was built entirely of human bones and skulls in memory of the thousands of people who were killed by epidemics. And wars, all the walls and ceilings of the church were built from the skulls and bones of the legs of 3,000 victims, while the remains of more than 21,000 victims were hidden in a crypt under the church.

• It was built by a local priest named “Vaclav Tomasik”, and he built it entirely from human bones in the eighteenth century between 1776 and 1804, in memory of the soldiers who were victims of the “Thirty Years’ War” (1618-1648),

• Which is considered one of the most devastating conflicts in European history, as he saw in the presence of human bones a reminder and a sermon for church visitors to remind of death, during his visit to the graves of war victims,

• in addition to victims of deadly diseases such as plague and cholera, as diseases and epidemics spread in Central Europe at that time, the most important of which was cholera Which claimed dozens of lives as a result of this war.

• A newspaper indicates that Tomasik collected and cleaned the bones of the victims and planted them in the walls and ceilings of the church between 1776 and 1804, where he installed the skulls of important personalities, including the mayor of the town, in front of the altar,

• while the skull and bones of Tomasik were the last humans remains that were entered into the church after his death in 1804.

In The End:

It was customary in this era to commemorate the dead, who kept their remains inside the churches.

The abundance of epidemics was the main reason for the large number of deaths in this era, followed by wars, which caused many corpses in the places of living, which was the reason for the spread of diseases and epidemics.

I know that it is a terrifying place for a moment, but it is one of the most famous places of tourism and not the only one. There are other places that we will discuss in other articles later.

I will be waiting for your opinions, my friends, in the comments as usual, and if there are any topics want to know about it tells me in the comments my friends.

Best Wishes Till We Meet In The Next Topic