The Kutna Hora Bone Church: The Day Trip Older Kids Talk About for Years

There is a chapel an hour from Prague where the chandelier is made of human bones. Every bone in the body is in it. My kids talk about it more than the castle.

The Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora holds the remains of about forty thousand people, arranged in the eighteen hundreds by a woodcarver into garlands, pyramids, a coat of arms and that chandelier. It is not gruesome the way it sounds. It is quiet, a little strange, and it opens a conversation about plague, war and what people did with the dead that a ten year old is ready for and a five year old is not.

That is the honest age line. Over nine, go. Under seven, do something else that day.

Kutna Hora itself was the silver mine that made Bohemia rich. The Czech Museum of Silver takes you into the medieval mine in a white coat and helmet, through tunnels a meter wide, for an hour. Kids over six love it and it is the part that turns a weird chapel into a real story about a town.

The cathedral and the walk

St Barbara’s is the other reason to come. A Gothic cathedral built by miners for their patron saint, with a ceiling that looks like a forest of stone and frescoes of the miners at work. Fifteen minutes inside, then the walk along the terrace with the view over the vineyards.

The train from Prague takes an hour, and from the main station in Kutna Hora it is a short local train or a taxi to the ossuary. Do the ossuary first while it is quiet, then the mine, then the cathedral and lunch in the old town. Back in Prague for dinner.

Pack it as a full day. It is one of the two or three best days out in central Europe for a family with older children, and hardly anyone does it.

Planning Czechia with kids? Start with the full Czechia family travel guide, or send me the ages and the dates and I will come back with what is really available.