Langos via leipzig: Toxic water and rattlin' bones

When we stopped rambling and eventually started following inscribed (and proposed) UNESCO World Heritage sites in Czechia our travel mood lifted from lacklustre to elated.

Remarkable some of them. Most tucked away in the tiny, somewhat ethnically more Germanic, region of the south-west corner of Southern Bohemia and in parts of Southern Moravia; tho’ there are others lightly scattered elsewhere. We almost missed the really wonderful ones as we were so nearly ready to drive on, out of the country.

First on our UNESCO list was the spruced up classical old spa town of Karlovy Vary, in Western Bohemia. Mineral waters that fountain up all over town are tapped, and locals pause to drink copious amounts in order to cure any and all ailments. They come prepared, filling their personal mugs, called Bechers, from the permanently pouring water spouts. Bechers have handles that double as a sipping pipe, designed to keep the water from staining their teeth.

The way the mineral water stains most of the fountains around town it looks almost as toxic as the local liquor, Bercherovka, which is made from pure alcohol mixed with the town water along with spices. It is sold out of street stands all over town. Concocted in a pharmacy, in 1807, by Jan Becher, it has a strong medicinal flavour and, reputedly, only two people in the world know the recipe. Quite possibly because not too many more really want to.

Kutná Hora was next on our UNESCO list. Another site hugely popular with the coach trippers from Prague who literally came in droves.

Silver dug up in the Kutna Hora region supplied much of Europe with its currency throughout the 1300s, and with the funds came the construction of cavernous cathedrals, and the presence of the Cistercian monks: a contemplative clever lot.

One of these monks, Abbot Henry, returned from his pilgrimage perk to the Holy Land in 1278 with a small souvenir: a jar full of dirt he’d scraped from the grounds of Golgotha.

This he sprinkled over the burial grounds at Sedlec, a couple of kilometres downhill from Kutna Hora. Somewhat like the silver, the word soon spread about the holy land and the holy soil, which started a mad rush across all of Europe of folk wishing to be buried in the holy ground at Sedlec.

So many bodies came to be buried there, layer upon layer, that after the Black Death, a monk was given the delicate job of digging up the old bones to make way for the new. He was half-blind. I wonder if that assisted, or accentuated, his task.

He stacked all the bones in a nearby crypt where they lay until 1870 when a woodcarver, named Frantisek Rindt, who was in the employ of the Prince of Schwartzenburg at the time, was given an equally ghoulish task: that of decorating the chapel with the bones from the crypt.

The work took him 10 years. I hope he was paid well.

Frantisek coated every surface of the chapel with friezes over arches dripping like boney curtains; arranged urns of bones like floral art in alcoves; displayed a coat of arms of the Schwartzenburg family strung with intricate rows of fragile little metatarsal bones and small skull bones; hung a centrepiece chandelier using every bone in the human body; dangled crossed bones with skull-topped figurines light-lit and grotesque ready to dry rattle in a gust of wind; and meticulously mounded every side chapel with pyramids of dry-stacked human bones. Knee bone to kneebone. Thighbone to thighbone.

Mouldy. Mildewy. Macabre.

Over all of it, high on top of the Ossuary spire, a skull and crossbones symbolically marks this spot, as it did in ancient burial places, as a place of death.