On Saturday, Sarah, Holland, Stephen, and myself caught the 10 AM train to Kutna Hora. The UNESCO World Heritage Site is an hour outside of Prague, and is known for its grand churches and silver mining. The train kind of dropped us off in the middle of no where, so we jumped on a bus that we hoped/assumed would bring us to where we wanted to go. After about 15 minutes of passing beautiful wine country and winding through some random neighborhoods, we were sufficiently confused.. and became even more confused when some of the locals started yelling at us and motioning for us to get off of the bus. It didn’t look like we were near anything significant whatsoever, but even the bus driver was trying to scurry us off — so off we went.
From our past experience there’s usually a swarm of tourists all going to the same place so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for, but this was like a ghost town. We wandered around a street until we found someone who didn’t really speak english to try to give us directions to the center of town. He tried explaining something about a fountain and then just pointed the opposite way we came and just said “Go”. Oooook.
That was all the direction we needed really, because we did end up finding a giant fountain and everything else we had been looking for. The town reminded us of a Cesky Krumlov, but with wayyy less tourists. It was quiet, quaint, peaceful & colorful. We walked along this awesome passageway that led us to the famous St. Barbara’s Church.
This church is was of the best known in the Czech Republic and was amazingly beautiful inside. It was also here that my camera died 😦 so the rest of these pictures are from Holland and Stephen.
For lunch, we went to Cafe Harmonia (as was recommended by TripAdvisor) and sat outside in the shade. I got this chicken tortilla thing with bleu cheese that was pretty tasty, and then a crepe for dessert.
After lunch, we walked around the town and ran into this lovely green space at the bottom of the hill, there were some locals with their dogs sitting around but other than that, it was pretty empty. We wandered around for a bit and enjoyed the weather.
We found the bus station again and rode it to the nearby town of Sedlec to see the famous ossuary. It’s this small church decorated with the bones about 40,000 people. They weren’t killed specifically for decoration.. they mostly just died from the Plague and then were used to decorate the church? It was more quirky than sad or scary. There were 4 different skull pyramids and even a bone chandelier — the point was to show the people that everyone is equal after death. A pretty powerful way to convey that message I think.
Overall it was pretty crazy (and awesome), and we spent about half an hour gawking at everything. After that, we had seen all we had really come to see, and decided to head to the train station to make the 5 PM home. We sat on the back porch and drank wine, enjoying the mild weather and lack of people staying at the Pension this weekend.
A Place in Prague 