
The hundreds of thousands of human bones have been arranged in all kinds of creative ways, from bone chalices and chandeliers to strings of skulls and bones hung across the ceiling like history’s most depressing party bunting. It’s the Ted Bundy approach to interior design – the entrance to Disneyland’s Nightmare Before Christmas ride if they’d sourced their raw materials from a morgue rather than a Hollywood prop department.The basement at Sedlec, where all the bone sculptures are located, is open to the public and has long been one of the most popular tourist spots in the Czech Republic, attracting around 200,000 visitors every year. All kinds of people – from Polish pensioners to fans of “grief tourism” (AKA sociopaths who holiday in Auschwitz and Chernobyl) – come here from all over the world to shoot their new profile pictures next to the piles of 500-year-old human skulls.Now, though, the 14th-century church building is in serious need of repair. The bones are beginning to crumble and the church leans drunkenly to one side; the owners can’t put the restoration work off any longer.Of course, this isn't going to be your standard church restoration job. The basement hasn’t changed since 1870, and the grim decorations now have to be taken apart and moved for the first time since they were installed. Nothing like this has been done before, because – to the international authorities’ knowledge, at least – nothing like this has existed before outside the fictitious realm of Rob Zombie movies and hack-and-slash video games. Compounding their problems, the restorers in charge of Sedlec say that no one alive today actually knows how the bones were fixed together in the first place.
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