Leaving behind the remote bone chapel at Czermna in Poland, we headed 110 kilometres south and west by train to the Czech Republic and its famous ossuary at Sedlec in Kutna Hora. The photographs of Sedlec with its bone chandeliers and skull pyramids were so gruesome and ghoulish that I expected this charnel house to be the somewhat spooky highlight of our tour of weird wonders. It is a place, we were to discover, where legend and history meet. New meanings emerge in each generation, so that what the bones meant then and to those people are not necessarily what they mean now and to me, or to you.
Or then again, maybe in some sense they are – because, within the contradictions at Sedlec brought about by the evolution of the monastery, its destruction, restoration, the accretion of bones, the conflicting architectural and artistic transitions it underwent, and the advent of modern tourism, a thread remains that has to do with resurrection. And that has to do with the inescapable contrasting demands of transformation and continuity and, finally, with what we humans mean by hope.
Our first stop was Sedlec’s cathedral and our first storyteller Jiří Arnet, hospitable and smiling in neat trousers and an ironed shirt, a guide whose excellent English was matched by an extensive knowledge of the place and its history. For the Sedlec story starts long before its charnel house.
It was 1142. The Cistercians were on the move; decades before, a restless monk known as Robert of Molesme, son of a French nobleman, had left his community to live with some hermits in small huts made of branches. For him the Benedictine life in traditional monasteries had become too comfortable and he wanted to return to a stricter interpretation of St Benedict’s Rule. He and the hermits found this austerity at Molesme with their stick huts and a chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity in the woods but, as Robert’s reputation for sanctity grew, so did Molesme, and it became wealthier, and its practice became lax. So Robert left again to found another new monastery in a desolate valley deep within the forest at Citeaux, near Dijon in eastern France, in 1098. They were the first Cistercians.
Casting off their black Benedictine habits and donning a new white habit and black scapula (or apron), these first Cistercians made plain their wish to simplify. Cluny, the Benedictine monastery from which Robert of Molesme had come, was one of the most powerful in the history of Europe. In fact, it was more than a monastery; it was a whole network of communities, with Cluniac houses not only in France but in England too – in Lewes in Sussex, and Much Wenlock in Shropshire, and Castle Acre in Norfolk – and its wealth was legendary.
It was this wealth to which Robert of Molesme objected when he went to live in his hut of sticks. He was not alone; the Cistercian movement gained many followers. By the end of the twelfth century there were Cistercian houses spread throughout France and into England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Eastern Europe. Among them was the house at Sedlec. So, right from the start, it seems that Sedlec was about simplicity. And not just the easy or accidental simplicity of a daisy or a child; rather that deliberate simplicity that results from paring down and casting off. Simplicity excavated from the rocks of ambition.
Even if you know nothing of how the Cistercians came to be, nothing of their reforming zeal and their simplicity, in Sedlec Cathedral you feel the open space their austerity created. The unadorned cathedral with its creamy limewashed walls and clear windows admitting great swathes of light, with its bare stone floors and spare furnishings, invites tranquillity. Not just to your eyes, but to your mind and even to your lungs. You take a deep breath, exhale it slowly, breathe again. The cathedral breathes with you, easily, the great surging pillars extending down its nave at once rooted and straight as a row of ancient, elegiac elms.
Present in these stones are the praises and lamentations of generations. Cistercian simplicity and sufficiency are embodied here, not concepts merely, nor even rules of life, but physical realities in stone arches at once humble and soaring. Looking between those arches into the north transept you can see cunningly crafted self-supporting stone steps spiralling upward in airy flight, curled as the paring of a carpenter’s plane, marvellous as a DNA molecule.
I think of how fascinated we are in the modern age with DNA, the secrets it unlocks – history, identity, biological inheritance – suggesting strengths and susceptibilities to our twenty-first-century consciousnesses as fortune tellers might have done to our forebears. We look back to discover our belonging and look forward to predict or circumvent our fates, our scientific sorceress the millionth magnification of a microscope, its thin slides uplifting totemic drops of blood, saliva-stained fibres, a plucked hair. Sedlec’s charnel house is heaped with such DNA. But it seems to me there is another kind of DNA in the place, not specific to individuals: deep, inherited, identifying features that are corporately shared and reside not only in the charnel house full of bones, but also metaphorically in the stories told by the charnel house and its cathedral. Here in these formative pasts we catch a glimpse of the continuing nature of the place; we see part of the cultural DNA, if you like, of Bohemia, where destruction and restoration seem perpetually to chase each other’s tails.
Built, as we know, by the Cistercians in the twelfth century, the cathedral of Our Lady and St John the Baptist was plundered by the Hussites in 1421. It was restored in 1709 only to become a state tobacco barn a hundred years later in 1812. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it has been restored yet again with great care and sensitivity, a monument to the beauty of light, stone, wood and faithfulness.
Down the north side of the nave runs a series of enormous twenty-foot canvasses depicting scenes from this resurrection history. Our guide Jiří points to the first: a man on a horse and other men, in white robes; there are trees and animals and a whole sylvan landscape to scan, before the eye is eventually drawn to the figures at the centre giving and receiving something … one small box – a doll’s house? a dog house? a chest? It is the landowner and courtier Miroslav’s donation to the Cistercians: the grant of land for the foundation of the monastery depicted in the model of a building handed over. And there is Abbot Heidenreich, friend of Wenceslas II, who had the first cathedral built. Good King Wenceslas, hitherto snowbound, suddenly leaps from a Christmas carol, has a summertime life and a purpose beyond his gift to the poor man on the feast of Stephen, in deep snow, crisp and even.
On another enormous canvas, fierce men with merciless swords and righteous zeal are slaying the swordless monks. Gruesome and gory, there is fire in the eyes of the triumphant and the dying alike. These warriors, Jiří tells us, are the Protestant Hussites, and we learn about the Hussite Wars, with the screaming of fleeing women, masculine skulls cracked open, entrails pinned to trees.
Centuries later there is the story of the dashing young architect Santini who at 25 designed the restored cathedral, spawning a whole genre called Gothic Baroque. Then bleak black-and-white photographs of the dry tobacco years, the dereliction of neglect. This was not just the history of a cathedral but a story of a nation, or a people – nations, really, and peoples, to be more correct – for this place was Bohemia and Austria-Hungary; it was Přemyslid and Hapsburg; it was Czechoslovakia; a protectorate of Germany; Soviet Communist and now, by a velvet revolution, a democratic capitalist republic. It was all of these things and none of them for none of them alone describes it entirely. I was standing in a place where history felt somehow not clearly linear but kaleidoscopic. Every time you turned the lens, different shapes and colours dropped into view and a whole new pattern emerged.
Intrigued, we left the cathedral and headed for the charnel house. It would take years to begin to know such a place, I reflected, as we walked from the cathedral of St Mary across a city road and up the easy ossuary hill, but at least we had some bare bones of Bohemian history on which to hang impressions as we encountered the human bones that were waiting. Those ossuary bones that had leapt as impossible monstrosities from the photographic files of the curious macabre to horrify and fascinate my disbelieving eyes; that had filled my shoes with question marks.
* * *
Up the hill as we approach, the ossuary at Sedlec looks like a small gothic church, buttresses at the west face and the north and south sides, long lancet windows, copper-topped towers. Its top half, All Saints Chapel, is light and bright, with space for prayer and an exhibition of photographs that aim to capture the play of light on stone, but visitors do not come for this; they come for the shocking human bones that lie below. Down the wide, steep stairs in the vaulted ossuary, massed in vast pyramids that reach to the ceiling, stacked, glued into sculptures, strung from the arches like garlands are the remains of some 40,000 persons, mainly victims of medieval plagues and the Hussite Wars. It is a spectacle most bizarre – compelling and revolting in equal measure.
The ossuary, started in 1400 and continued in 1511, is constructed on three levels. The entrance extension at ground level, designed (1703–10) by the same young Santini who restored the cathedral, feels somehow familiar; then immediately inside you must make a choice. Either you go down into gloomy half-light or you go up to the light chapel above. Descent was my intention and I did not linger for long over the trinket stall selling plastic skulls and luminous skeletons, but moved purposefully on.
The stairs were disconcertingly broad. Each could probably have accommodated ten people standing shoulder to shoulder, and there must have been 20 stairs. If they marched in military precision as do ants, two hundred people could descend all at once; these were stairs fit for a large influx of humanity. The descent was steep as well as wide, and for a moment I felt as if I might be swallowed. Zuzana and I paused, each as if to let the other go first, though in truth there was no need to pause; we had arrived near closing time, the place was empty, the steps could easily accommodate us side by side, and I realized the pause was not about courtesy at all. But still my feet would not budge. ‘Shall we go down?’ I asked Zuzana, who was also inexplicably waiting and, leaning slightly nearer to each other, we set out in the depressions worn smooth by the generations of footfalls that had preceded us.
* * *
The descent is swift; because it is also deep you cannot see much of the charnel house before you arrive in it, but you can feel the gradual temperature change almost immediately. There are bones mounted on the stone walls of the staircase, saying something, in pictures. Saying what? – fourteen inches from my face, near enough to be heard as a shout, but I cannot discern what they are saying. I see only a smattering of bones, intriguing and horrible, and the problem is not merely visual. The great ‘what is this?’ that I feel does not spring merely from an inability to read, but from a more fundamental question about how I am to regard the objects that face me. Are these bones artist’s materials or human remains? And the ‘what are they?’ has triggered an as yet undescried ‘what am I?’ which has rendered me inexplicably and deeply unsettled.
Sublimating the inarticulate, I concentrate on looking. Gradually, my eyes decipher the bone symbols: a five-foot-tall chalice; the signature of František Rint (1870) the bone artist; the large Christian symbol IHS Jesus Hominis Salvator – Jesus, Saviour of mankind; and each recognition of a symbol or a name seems a small achievement. Or maybe what I sense is simply relief that what I first saw as a human thigh, a finger, a shoulder blade and a few ivory ribs I can now see as a picture. I do not want to see the individual fingers, ribs, femur, scapula; I do not want to think about where they came from. My stomach rights itself again. As artist’s materials they are so much less personal and particular.
Descending to the last step, my hand firmly gripping the railing, I focus on the symbols and try very hard to resist mentally unpicking the parts. I try to tell myself that this is art and see it whole, but I do not entirely succeed. High on a stone pedestal flanked by columns of stacked skulls and femurs, eight pelvises line up to form the curve of a giant bone chalice. Knobbly ends of femurs and lacy sacrum shields splay against the flat planes of pelvises as the chalice curves towards its thin fibia stem. What giant hand would hold this blood cup? What kind of wine is poured from someone else’s pelvis? Still gripping the railing, I descend further.
My feet hit the simple stone of the charnel house floor. In front of me at the foot of the stairs, four thin towers of skulls and bones, about ten feet tall, stand like pillars in the short central hall beyond which, at the far end of the charnel house, is a chapel on whose walls are mounted further bone decorations: a huge bone monstrance, a bone wreath. The altar in this chapel is simple and bare and at its feet lay small piles of disconnected bones. High in the arches before and alongside the chapel, ropes of skulls are hung as if they were festive garlands, cranial curves and edges like fists of roses or clumps of chrysanthemums, a bizarre harvest from some garden of the dead.
Over the four towers is suspended, like a spook’s corona, what is perhaps Rint’s pièce de résistance: an enormous bone chandelier reputed to contain (many times over) every one of the two hundred and six bones in the human body. The chandelier hangs so near the four towers of bones that looking up all is bone. Bone above me, bone around me, bone beside me, bone before me; thousands of disjointed bones orchestrated, prized and pieced, punctuated by the dark vacancies of socket and jaw.
I shudder. I keep my hands from covering my ears, because they want to shut out all this discord, though the noise is actually inside me – bones in mid-air suspended, flying bones that should still be lying companionably with their fellows. Wanting to run out from under these fitful bones, away from this restless cacophony, I make myself stand here, under and amid it. I stand and look.
I notice, as if belonging to some other hopeful realm, small lights glimmering at the chandelier’s tips. Breathing slowly, calmly, I spy among the many shades of ivory, stone and ash of the bones, glimmering gilded wings, harbingers of life. And then I see that these belong to four rubicund painted plaster cherubs, one atop each of the four thin towers. The cheeks of the one nearest me are plumped out with breath as he presses the air into his trumpet; on his peachy knee sits a human skull, his tinted hand shiny and bright against the chalky grey cranium. His sheer fleshiness seems a delight to my bone-dried eyes. I can almost feel the air that fills his cheeks. I wonder what he is announcing with such petulance. And then I am glad of his petulance, for it means he looks alive enough to have a mood.
Away from these disconcerting concoctions, in the farthest four corners of the charnel house or kostnice, corresponding to the combined points of the compass, NE, NW, SE, SW, stand four large rounded pyramids of skulls over each of which is suspended a gilded coronet. In each, the solid mass of skulls has been tunnelled through and lit from inside with electric lights to give a sense of their great depth and proportions.
Each mound is locked behind wood and metalwork screens that fill the space from the floor up to the overhead arches. Nevertheless, generations of visitors have tried to reach them. Here and there the perfect balance of skull on skull has been jarred by some rogue’s reach, the screening breached by a daredevil’s bravado. Many skulls have coins in their eye sockets or between their jaws. Well-wishers, perhaps, seeking good luck; lovers maybe with a wish on their lips; gamblers hoping for a lucky toss. Or maybe those glinting coins signify an unthought instinct to pacify the dead lest the dead seek retribution for the disturbances we bring.
There is little rest, it seems to me, for these remains. I am disquieted by the bone plaques and chalices, the dismembering that they reiterate, the frippery of skull garlands, the jocular tilt of the chandelier. There is something subversive in these that offends the sense of decency in me; perhaps one of the points of art is to subvert and disturb ‘normal’, but I find them contrived and offputting. The simple mounds of skulls, however, draw me back to look at them again. Despite the chancy glint of coins there is something solemn and beautiful about them. The skulls neither reject nor receive these mementoes; the intentions of visitors move them not one iota. They simply stare out in all directions in unbroken silence. Some people say the shapes are not pyramids but bells. In Slovak, Zuzana tells me, tolling bells are thought to be God’s voice. Maybe they are bells calling to prayer. They could just as well be tolling the death knell for us all.
I think it is the sheer number of skulls in those mounds that moves me. If they have a voice, this is it: a voice of solidarity. Whether that is a solidarity of the dead or of all human beings I cannot tell. Fingers curled around the cool ironwork screen, I lean my face against the wooden bars, peer at one skull after another, looking for some clue, for individuality perhaps, for some identifying feature that might suggest a story. There are hundreds of minute differences between them, but the overall effect is unity. Except for the Hussite warriors in the glass museum case at the foot of the stairs, whose skulls showed the blows of blades – one even bearing a fault line cracked and re-grown – the skulls here, particularly the mountains of skulls, tell no personal tales. Whatever their lives, there is now only one story they share. Together they wait.
* * *
Legend has it that in 1278 the Cistercian Abbot Henry brought back with him from the Holy Land a handful of soil, given by the King of Jerusalem, which he sprinkled on the cemetery at Sedlec, making it hallowed ground. The ground itself was believed to have special properties that could rot the body swiftly, thus releasing the soul to Paradise. This theory spawned a myth that burial at Sedlec would guarantee a place in heaven within three days of death. We are told that people journeyed from many parts of medieval Europe to be buried there, travelling in great discomfort, or carried in carts over rough roads by their families as death approached.
In the end too many people came to be buried in Sedlec. First the legend of quick release made Sedlec the favoured burial spot with Central Europe’s elite; then the plagues of the fourteenth century and the Hussite Wars of the fifteenth decimated the population. Old remains were exhumed to make way for new burials, and bones piled up in churches.
The first skull pyramid, they say, was constructed by a half-blind Cistercian who was given the task of collecting up these exhumed remains. He started making order out of chaos, one skull at a time. Centuries and renovations later, we see the result of the work he began. Skull after skull placed with complete anonymity and respectful carefulness, one alongside the other, over and over again, stacked row upon row, until together they make a pyramid of human loss both horrifying and beautiful. There are thousands and thousands of unrelated persons pressed into intimate proximity approximating to a familiarity they can scarce have known. Eyeless sockets, unblinking, tell the brutal truth of their mortality and mine. Whether one regards these skulls as fellows or merely as bricks in a wall, their stories come to this – a common humanity, the brevity of life, the longevity of bones and, for the ones who put them here, the hope of resurrection.
Resurrection is a hope that I feel Western society has mainly lost. At the very least it is a hope about which we know little, and so about which we hardly dare speak with conviction. The large numbers of resolved atheists who might see resurrection as complete nonsense, and the even larger number of agnostics who thrive on a healthy dose of doubt, are not the only ones who may feel that resurrectionists are on wobbly ground. Believers too, of many kinds, have little idea what resurrection life might be like. I use the term ‘believer’ here in the broadest possible sense – the very many people who, deep down, cannot convince themselves that death is the utter end; who believe that life goes on but are not sure whether they think that will be a resurrection, or a reincarnation, or a kind of ghostly lingering.
Among those believers are the millions who would call themselves Christians, who would expect a resurrection and would look to Scripture for an indication about what that might look like. But even here the details are few. There is the story of the poor man Lazarus in an afterlife and the rich man in suffering who asks if Lazarus might dip his finger in water and give the rich man a drop. Whole essays have been written on the degree to which this suggests that bodies with fingers are real in post-mortem life.
Then there are the accounts of Jesus’ actions after his resurrection in which he seems to do very ordinary and physical things – walking and talking, cooking and eating – and in which he does extraordinary things like appearing in a locked room, or walking on water, or ascending into heaven. These passages of Scripture suggest that resurrection bodies are real, physical bodies capable of speech and digestion, but not exactly like the bodies we have now. Apart from these examples, there is not much in the way of specific description of the resurrection life in the Christian scriptures.
Standing looking at those hills of skulls in Sedlec, I realize that I have been surrounded by a landscape of Christianity for years and yet I know little about how the ideas surrounding its core belief of resurrection evolved. Thoughtful, with those solemn skull mounds behind me, I mount the stairs, through layers of cold and up towards the heavy wooden charnel house door which stands ajar, admitting a warm yellow shaft of low, late afternoon light.
* * *
In a medieval stone house across the road from the charnel house I met Karel Koubsky (42) who, as the ossuary’s first twenty-first-century administrator, has the peculiar task of maintaining the chapel and ensuring its future. It is a job he never expected to have, although he grew up as familiar with the ossuary as anyone could be: his father was administrator before him. He likes his job. ‘I should have done it earlier’, he says, but it was a challenge he did not want to meet when he was younger and went off to work as a computer programmer.
As a teenager the ossuary was a place of thrills; he and some friends once dared each other to spend the night there. Now it is both a business and a vocation to him. He is interested in how the place affects its visitors; he has seen so many people arrive noisy and gradually calm down. Sometimes companies hire the ossuary after hours for corporate hospitality. Almost invariably, Karel says, there is someone among these professional persons for whom the experience is overwhelming. ‘There is something you can’t explain about this place,’ he confesses, ‘it opens people up.’ He has seen the hardest-looking people, punks covered in tattoos and piercings, arrive edgy and tough. It touches them. It reaches their fragility and humanity.
Even across continents Sedlec continues to speak. Karel tells us of the time a film crew came with Jeremy Irons to film Dungeons and Dragons. ‘They took the place over,’ he recounts, ‘and we think one of the film crew took one of the skulls because we got a letter from Customs saying someone in Hollywood was sending us a plaster skull. When it got here is wasn’t plaster but real.’ He believes they claimed it was plaster to get it through Customs without obstruction. ‘We don’t know that someone took it,’ he concludes, ‘but we know that someone returned it.’
‘Do you believe the skull somehow communicated a wish to go back?’ I ask.
‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he replies with candour, ‘but I think somehow maybe it did. That person could have disposed of it. Why did he go to the trouble of sending it back? It worked on his conscience.’
Karel tells us about the first time he touched one of the skulls in the ossuary after he had come back to take up his current position. ‘I held it in my hands and I had a moment of real connection. I looked at it and thought – this was a person like me. It was very personal, like stroking my wife’s head.’ I notice his arms, the strength in his physical frame and immense energy in every gesture as he speaks. How it contrasts with this intimate tenderness.
When I question the claim that some of the bones are Polish, Belgian and Bavarian, he replies: ‘We can’t prove this, but it is legend. I am trying to figure out how this would be even possible.’ He notes the difficulty of medieval travel. ‘One legend has it they were moved here because it was said that you could be in heaven faster, that in three days in this soil your body would decompose. But of course we have found no chemical evidence for this.’
He is keen to sift fact from fiction in these legends. When I ask about the authenticity of Abbot Henry’s visit to the Holy Land, Karel leaps to reach a large volume containing the latest articles and research on the ossuary. Brushing the sugar bowl out of the way with the back of his hand, he lays it out on the table between our coffee cups. In it are pages of charts, illustrations, architectural elevations, essays, all in Czech which I cannot read. Zuzana’s head and his bend over pages that entice and elude me.
‘Part of the story is true’, Karel looks up in excitement, his finger poised on a page. ‘The earth from Jerusalem is very likely. He did go there. Soil was often brought back from the Crusades. But he couldn’t have spoken with the King of Jerusalem; there wasn’t a king in Jerusalem then.’
Karel has been involved with this extraordinary place since his youth. It not only provides his employment, it also clearly engages his mental and emotional energies. He is as fascinated by its history as he is involved in the minutiae of its daily maintenance. So I am really surprised when he tells me he thinks it should be closed down. There is regret in his voice when he says this, but no hesitation.
‘Why?’ I ask, amazed.
His answer shows how much the place has become a part of him, how much that first intimate touch of skull has come to shape his imagination. ‘Because they should be in peace. Two hundred thousand people come through here in a year. I apologize to the bones. I tell them I am sorry, but you are helping me to raise money for the cathedral.’
The bones are not artist’s materials to him. They are not fragments, war trophies, victims or curiosities. Pierced, wired and glued in installations though they be, they are not the thing they have become, but the thing they were. They are people, neighbours, persons from the other side of midnight. I think I almost understand this. It is something similar to the way I am beginning to feel about the bones in my own charnel house at home.
* * *
Late in the evening, awash with coffee, stories and a wild array of skeletal images, Zuzana and I retired to our hotel aptly named ‘The Executioner’. It was decorated, in black humour that I have been told is typically Czech, with baronial crests and suits of armour, limewashed walls the colour of raw flesh on which were mounted an axe, sword, spiky ball and chain and various unnamed instruments of torture. On one entire wall was painted, in medieval style, a festive betrothal or wedding feast at which a miscreant observer, tied to a post, is having his eyes plucked out by birds.
Beneath this, we perused a menu featuring dishes such as katuv sleh (‘executioner’s whip’) and ‘hangman’s meat’. Curiously unattracted by these, we ordered the largest salad available, which arrived in a bowl for about six, and spent the next hour stolidly munching our way through slightly green tomatoes and clumsy hunks of cucumber while pondering our mortality, the sobriety of which was punctured at intervals by bursts of hearty singing from the large party room next door. Through the crack in the French doors, beneath a heavily framed picture of Holy Mary, came disorderly strains of ‘Frère Jacques’ in stumbling rotation, which gave way to the local football song ‘I’m from Kutna Hora’.
In the morning we negotiated our way towards payment through a minefield of exclamation marks which amused but failed to enhance translation. ‘Receive Euro’ a notice read, adding ‘(course according to daily offer of bank and exchange office!!!)’, and ‘Facilities for payment euro!!! And money-back only in Czech money!!!’ Laughing with Zuzana, I unfolded a suitable number of Czech koruna from the correct bag of currency, hoping not to be left with too much over.
As I waited for these transactions to be completed, I was struck by the fact that currency is not the only thing here that keeps on changing hands and forms. The cathedral, once commandeered as a tobacco drying barn, now a world heritage site, has let its ossuary too be passed into other hands. It was this transfer of ownership that enabled the extravagant decorations we see today, since it was only when the monastery was abolished in the nineteenth century and its lands bought by the powerful Schwarzenberg family that Rint was employed as its new designer. The monumental bells might have been the work of a half-blind Cistercian, but Rint’s were the garlands, the chalices, the skull-hugging cherubs, the monstrances, the columns and ropes of bones, the macabre chandelier. His is the signature of 1870 picked out in human finger bones.
The Schwarzenbergs left their mark too. This is for me perhaps the eeriest of all the decorations in the ossuary: the shield they commissioned that hangs across the screen of the bell in the northeast corner of the kostnice, a great coat of arms topped with a crown of skulls and bones. On the lower right quarter a bone raven, with a curved beak of human ribs, rises from the flat crest to pluck out the eye of a Turk. No actual Turk’s skull was used, of course, but the message is clear – a Crusader’s victory. This is not the only victory it seems to me that the coat of arms proclaims. Its very presence is a mark of ownership on the whole kostnice. In their family crest emblazoned in other men’s bones, marks of pre-eminence and authority are chillingly declared. It is an image that lingered as we prepared to leave the city.
* * *
As we boarded the train to Prague the rain began. I hardly cared. We would be travelling for more than twelve hours – it was a good day for rain, a good day for staring out of windows and pondering, and I had so much to think about. I had expected the charnel houses would all be pretty similar, that they would all say more or less the same thing to me. What that thing was I didn’t know, but I’d felt that seeing them I would begin to sense some kind of continuity. After all, they all shared a single common purpose – the dignified disposal of human remains. Hoping that visiting these other charnel houses would make me feel more at home with my own, I had come on this journey looking for resolution, peace perhaps. What I felt as the Czech Republic rolled by, blurred through rivulets of rain, was contradiction, irresolution and disharmony.
At the bone house in Czermna, there had been a clear sense of purpose. Once we had found the foreigners’ cemetery the whole story began to make sense. The area had been fought over and ceded to one nation after another: Germans having been expelled after the Second World War and twenty-first-century Germans having paid for recent repairs, questions of belonging and reconciliation were clearly central to the project. One got the feeling that Vaclav Tomaszek had had an undivided purpose and that that purpose, however demanding, was knowable, achievable and achieved. The bones themselves were orderly; the quiet nuns with practised talks gave the skull chapel an air of regularity. In that place of strangeness and forgiveness, there was a simple story: a single founder with a deliberate design expressed in the restoration of order and dignity.
Sedlec gave me none of this. Instead there were impossible legends. An alchemical ossuary which changed its character in different periods. A legendary founder who may indeed have brought soil from the Holy Land, but certainly not after speaking to a non-existent king of Jerusalem. An ossuary, first monastic, then destroyed and rebuilt; open bones, over centuries scattered, gathered, piled up, wired, stolen, returned. Tales of Belgian bodies, Polish bodies, Bavarian bodies; people who put themselves and their families to no end of trouble, choosing Sedlec over any other place on earth, over the familiar and familial, because they craved that fabled three-day release of their souls to Paradise. Then there were the hated Hussites with cleavered heads – battle-weary skulls, that had been broken and grown over again, telling the fact if not the detail of raging brains exposed, agonies endured and partial healing. An unsettling cocktail of brutal fact and intriguing fancy, these wildly varied stories vied for my attention like unruly children.
Even in the arrangement of the bones themselves, at Sedlec I had sensed discontinuity. The solid mounded bells like hills, with remains grouped together in row upon row, made by their sheer numbers a statement of solidarity, a human foundation. The later garlands, the chalice, the chandelier, were things ephemeral in comparison; dangling in the arches the bones looked fragile, as if one malicious snip of wire could send them all clattering to the floor. Lenka, the souvenir-seller at the entrance, had reminded us when we entered that the decorations were not cosmetic or whimsical but Christian symbols and that the message of the installation was clear: memento mori – remember you are mortal. Do today the good you would see done. Seize the present which is real and fleeting. I could see the point of what she said. But the feeling of disquiet at the baroque installations was not appeased.
I don’t know why. If it is acceptable to move, stack, arrange bones in a pyramid or in a colossal bell (‘the voice of God’), why should it be strange to make them into garlands that represent the life and fecundity of God’s world? Or into chalices brimful of wine – God’s blood – or a monstrance, a display cabinet for bread – God’s body – each in their way bearers of divine gift, marks of the goodness of the earth, fruitfulness of field and vineyard? I believed Rint had intended joy, but all I felt was a sense of the macabre.
Nowhere was this more strongly felt than when I looked at the Schwarzenberg family crest, for here were bones of all shapes and sizes sought not because they needed saving from the indignity of haphazard disposal, but chosen from among their fellows for the simple usefulness they provided to one household. Bones of all sizes seized from many bodies to create this manifesto of superiority. Bones that never belonged to any Schwarzenberg made to tell, in their death and forever, the superiority of the Schwarzenberg name, not only over them but also over Turks they had reputedly defeated and whose lands and farms and goods and chattels they had acquired.
Where the bells spoke to me of humility, the common humanity of us all, the Schwarzenberg crest spoke to me of pride, the singularity of the superior. Where the first left me feeling enlightened, at once standing on the edge of mystery and nearer to something true, the second left me feeling tricked by artifice, as if I had witnessed a theft that was unable to be rectified. The kostnice at Sedlec disturbed whatever peace I was trying to make with my own charnel house’s bones.
I have seen how unresolved things can sometimes solve themselves if you just lay them aside for awhile. Along comes a conversation, a book, a dream; the conscious and the subconscious work together on the problem, conspiring in the corner of your busy days like crossword fanatics, and you find, when you go to look at the problem again, that it has changed. Its thorns have grown less prickly, it is a less puzzling colour. Sometimes it is no longer on the problem shelf at all but has grown wings of its own and flown (or feet perhaps and toddled off) – even the new shape of it you don’t know, nor its mode of transport, if it has entirely disappeared.
This is what I did with Sedlec. For hours, against the window pane, elongated drops chased each other like small eels down rivulets of rain. My thoughts did much the same as I scratched busily in my lined notebook, registering my disquiet, examining as much of the roots of it as I could see, noting the images that came to mind, and then I left it. We were on the way to Prague again, and I had to clear enough space in my mind for whatever would befall us there.
I remember my first trip to Prague in 1990. A young American wife with her English husband, I went out of curiosity. We drove all the way from England in a red Peugeot 106, my adventurous parents in the back seat, slicing little circles of sausages for us at lunchtime and patiently folding and refolding maps.
It was a time of new beginnings: the end of European Communism and the reunification of Germany. We were all of us enthusiastic about what was happening in Central Europe and we drove through Berlin, where the jagged wall had just come down, celebrating liberty. At the spot where checkpoints had been we stopped, got out of the car, did a little freedom dance, took photographs, bought balloons from a trinket vendor. We were standing where people had done impossible things – dug tunnels underground, brazened it over high barbed wire, folded friends into the space in a car where a petrol tank should have been. They had risked everything for freedoms we considered commonplace.
Sometimes – fearfully, violently – they had lost these gambles. The weight of that fact saddened us and, suddenly feeling a little awkward in this strangely open unmarked space, we decided to let the balloons go. Together at first they bolted up then parted, each in turn riding its own current till they lost their tails and even their shape, drifting into specks of colour we could no longer follow with our eyes. One after another we lost sight of them all.
Back in the car, silent, we pressed on further into Eastern Germany and on towards Prague. Wonderful new things were happening; we hoped to glimpse the old before it disappeared. When I saw World War Two bullet holes in the sides of venerable Prague buildings I didn’t think ‘what a mess’, but ‘wow! what a great bit of history’. I wanted to go and put my fingers in the scars, see if deep down you could still sniff the whiff of gunpowder. Like Berlin, this was a city coming back to life. There was something vital in the air – like spring, like resurrection.
In those days historic guts of buildings were being devoured wholesale by the cranes and diggers of rejuvenation schemes. McDonalds was rising, efficient and fatty, behind an eighteenth-century façade. It was stiflingly hot. There was no air-conditioning. We took a tram home every afternoon, filled the enormous bath in our hotel flat with cold water and took turns to lie in it like zooed seals.
When the sun went down we would emerge, explore the streets of the city centre, eating pizza in the Old Town Square, watching the astonishing astronomical clock as its skeleton Death rang out the hours. As night fell we let ourselves fall under the magic of Charles Bridge. Passing through its alternating pools of light and gloom, we searched among the bridge’s thirty statues for St John Nepomuk and touched his shiny plaque, allegedly an assurance that we would one day return.
During all of my childhood in the United States, Prague had been, in my mind, primarily a satellite of communism. Associated with the enemy, it was a place that felt tinged with danger. Now I discovered that you really could walk halfway over the bridge and disappear in mist, just like in all the spy movies I had seen. That and the bullet holes meant that every stereotype was real after all, and as we drove west towards home, through forests of depressingly drab high-rise communist flats in decay, we hoped that the opening of the Czech Republic would bring something better for the people than more McDonalds.
Twenty years later I was on the train returning, more rather than less curious. It was not only post-Soviet changes that interested me now, and I had the advantage I had not had then of a companion translator. Returning through Prague station, Zuzana and I stopped at the Fantova Kavarna to savour the atmosphere and the coffee. There were six large brass-rimmed clocks mounted on the wall above six disused ticket kiosks. All of them stopped, all of them telling a different time. They seemed to me like the layers of Czech history, coexisting and variant all at once. There were several Pragues here.
Where we sat, under the battered green dome, alongside the art deco phone booth, an old Prague remained remembered in the wall frieze that faced the entrance doors where giant bare-breasted ladies with strong stone socialist arms upheld the fluttering motto ‘Prague, Mother of Cities’. Beneath all of this, as if arising literally from under the ground, another Prague of futuristic glass and gleaming steel was being constructed. And a bow-tie-wearing dynastic Schwarzenberg (His Serene Highness The Prince of Schwarzenberg, Count of Sulz, Princely Landgrave in Klettgau, and Duke of Krumlov) had lately become one of its senators.
As we waited for the Salzburg train that would take us, reluctantly, away from this station with its crumbling history above and its futuristic gleaming below, I thought of Sedlec with its unforgettable bones, put there not to be consigned to the past but in hope of the resurrection. Even those bleak bones are facing the future: a future not prophesied, as this station’s was, by the clean lines of glass and steel – a future that can only be imagined, but in the hope of which all other futures shared.
I could end this chapter here, let the rebuilding of cities, of cultures, the restorations of cathedrals and charnel houses carry the weight of resurrection. But I know that the promise implicit at Sedlec was not primarily about that; it was about generations of ordinary people hoping to live again in some kind of resurrection body recognizably their own, and I cannot divert their quest entirely into metaphor. It would be a cop-out. Sedlec was started by a Cistercian drive towards simplicity that sought a better life, both here and hereafter, but what drove people to Sedlec in their thousands throughout the Middle Ages and beyond was a belief in a real and personal resurrection. What on earth were they thinking?
With that question in my head, and an awareness of my own resurrection ignorance, I started investigating and discovered that what they thought was not exactly what previous generations had thought about the resurrection. In fact, theories of the resurrection and images of the resurrection have altered much over time. When we speak of ‘life after death’ now, we usually mean the life that follows immediately after bodily death, but the earliest sense of ‘resurrection’ did not mean this. It meant ‘new life after a period of being dead’. As the modern theologian N. T. Wright notes in his magisterial study on the resurrection, while pagans denied the possibility of resurrection, some Jews affirmed it as a long-term hope, and Christians claimed that it had already happened to Jesus and in the future would happen to them; but for all of them ‘resurrection’ was ‘a two-step story’. It was in effect, life after ‘life after death’. Wright notes that this meaning was constant throughout the ancient world until the second century.
In The Resurrection of the Body (Columbia University Press, 1995), Caroline Walker Bynum studies theories of the resurrection in Western Christianity from AD 200 to 1336. She notes that of all the ‘so-called world religions’ only those that arose in the Mediterranean Basin or the Middle East – Zoroastrianism, rabbinic Judaism, Christianity and Islam – hold a doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The Ancients, although they did write about life after death, never held that there would be a bodily resurrection. For Homer the body was real and the soul, after death, not more than a lamentable shadow of self, a wraith. For Plato or Cicero, the spirit was real and the body was a prison house. There might be life after death but not a resurrection; those who followed Homer knew they wouldn’t get a body and those who followed Plato didn’t want one. Resurrection was a radical and often offensive notion in the Greco-Roman world.
For those who believed it, it was also an imminently expected event. In the first millennium after Christ, Christians expected the physical return of Christ and the establishment of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ right then and there. When this did not happen, new theories of the resurrection began to emerge, beginning with the ‘seed’.
The oldest Christian metaphor for the resurrection of the body is the seed from I Corinthians 15, in which a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies and lives again. The seed image is also present in Islam (Sura 56.60–1) and in rabbinic Judaism.
For early Christians the body remained an inescapable carrier of identity so that by around 200 AD both Tertullian, writing in Latin, and Irenaeus, writing in Greek, were defending the importance of the body as much as ever. But a paradox remained. As Walker Bynum notes: ‘Body is flux and frustration, a locus of pain and process. If it becomes impassible and incorruptible, how is it still body? If it remains body, how is its resurrection either possible or desirable? To put it simply: if there is change, how can there be continuity and hence identity? If there is continuity, how will there be change and hence glory?’
Going back to the biblical image of the seed – if a sheaf of wheat sprouts from a seed buried in the earth, in what sense is that sheaf, which is new matter and a new structure, the redemption of the seed? How is the newly sprung wheat the same, and in any case why is similarity salvation? Early Christians such as Methodius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, the Syriac writers, Ambrose and Augustine all wrestled with these issues in the face of pagans who found the idea of resurrection perplexing.
The first-century pagan Celsus had claimed the body was worse than dung, and generations of writers added that it was a disgusting jar of urine, or a bag of shit, a prison of the soul, or an aching groan. The fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa called the body a ‘calamity’ and wondered, unless it was freed from illness and brutishness, who would want it back again. Discussions such as this carried on through the third and fourth centuries and none of the great writers of the period solved the conundrum of retaining identity while allowing change.
Then in the 390s theologians came back to the first-century Church Father, Origen of Alexandria, who had noted that in fact continuity and transformation are already happening in the human body and that they happen all the time. ‘For this reason, river is not a bad name for the body since, strictly speaking, the initial substratum in our bodies is perhaps not the same for even two days. Yet the real Paul or Peter, so to speak, is always the same.’
He wrote about this change that remains recognizable as being based on an eidos, or ‘form’ in the Platonic sense, a kind of plan coupled with a seminal capacity for growth and development. Origen’s eidos is a pattern that organizes the flux but retains an essential propensity for growth. At once coherent and dynamic, it operates, as Walker Bynum notes, ‘a bit like a genetic code’.
Although images of the resurrected body in Christianity continued to evolve over the centuries, what endured was the idea that the body was necessary to salvation because the body was necessary to any idea of self. By the time the Cistercians were moving across Europe towards Sedlec, the early image of seed that grows into a different and glorious sheaf was being replaced by the image of dust or ‘earth’, as the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux called it. His ‘earthy’ body represents both filth and decay and, at the same time, the stuff out of which the new, necessary and desirable resurrected body is made; to be ‘earth’ and ‘dust’ is to be the lowliness out of which something can be made.
His point is that resurrection is pure miracle, rather than a natural process. As Walker Bynum puts it, ‘The idea of person, bequeathed by the Middle Ages to the modern world, was not a concept of soul escaping body … it was a concept of self in which physicality was integrally bound to sensation, emotion, reasoning, identity – and therefore finally to whatever one means by salvation.’
So what were those people at Sedlec thinking when they gathered the bones into their charnel house? The remains at Sedlec were not regarded as mere biological waste; they were a necessary part of what it means to be a person – necessary even to the miracle of resurrection. For this resurrection was not going to be, argued Bernard, like the initial creation of matter, a creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, but a creation ex vetere, from the old, or even ex terrae pulvere, out of the dust of the ground.
As these ideas filtered down to less literate minds, common tradition had it that a femur and a skull were prerequisite for a resurrection, and to this day you will see many more femurs and skulls than anything else preserved in charnel houses and ossuaries. This is the ideological and intellectual framework in which the Cistercian charnel house at Sedlec was constructed and into which its thousands of bones were gathered.
Resurrection theories, of course, did not stop evolving in the Middle Ages. Seventeenth-century atomic theory suggested that all that was requisite for a resurrection was a single atom and, when eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New Testament scholars cast doubt on the historicity of miracles in general and in particular on the central Christian miracle, the Resurrection, believers began to conceive of the resurrection of Christ as an idea rather than a physical reality. Emphasis on the immortality of the soul increased and there developed a gradual preference for soul over body, so that many Christians, particularly in the rising Protestant tradition, conceived of life after death simply as a spiritual existence.
Even now, theories of the resurrection continue to emerge. Among the most recent are the ideas of the prize-winning quantum physicist John Polkinghorne; what intrigues me about these newest theories is that in a strange way they echo ideas that were present way, way back, in the days of Origen, before we imagined the resurrection in disembodied terms or conceived of the life beyond as angels with wings playing harps on clouds.
Polkinghorne notes, as have many before him, the continually changing nature of the human. ‘What maintains continuity in the course of this state of atomic flux’, he writes, ‘is the almost infinitely complex information-bearing pattern in which the matter of the body is at any one moment organized. It is this pattern that is the human soul.’ This pattern is not static, a given at birth, but may develop as character forms and experiences and decisions make us who we are. It is, he argues, ‘a perfectly coherent possibility […] to affirm the belief that the God who is everlastingly faithful will preserve the soul’s pattern post mortem’ so that it may be re-embodied again in a resurrection of the whole person.
At the crux of all these arguments lies a basic tension between continuity and transformation that I think is held in any concept of resurrection. What the ancient Church Fathers debated about bodies can be seen as well in the material rebirths of cities and nations. Wherever there is resurrection there is this tension between continuity and transformation – how much of the old is to be retained? What is essential in the old, and what is innovative about the new? How can these two be blended so that what emerges is recognizable but not a replica? Or how can the weaknesses of the old be transcended without destroying the essence of the thing?
As I discover new things about the development of beliefs concerning the resurrection, the whole doctrine seems more and more significant to me because I see that, from earliest times, what was being debated was not only something supernatural but also something fundamentally human – this dynamic tension of continuity and transformation. Every day, in fact, we live this dynamic as our cells reproduce, making us always who we are and yet each day one day older either growing or ageing – in any case, transforming into what we will eventually be.
I can see now why it is that, over millennia and across cultures and despite our present-day mantra that only the empirically evident is real, we humans have not been able to lay down the idea of a life beyond this one, and we continue to wonder and debate what that life might imply. Questions about the resurrection are inescapable because they are really questions about what it means to be simultaneously and inextricably both spiritual and physical.
I begin to understand what Sedlec was telling me. Sedlec was about possibility and the quest to find a lasting hope. Its story is about resurrection, about what might be possible that we do not understand, about hoping in the midst of doubt, or the possibility that what we hope for may never be.
It is not so much about believing the impossible but believing that, because our knowledge is limited, there may be many possibilities of which we have not conceived. It is about leaving room for the improbable or at least the unproven; actually, not just leaving room, but actively making room. It is the daring act of staking a claim in the unprovable. That is what makes it hope rather than optimism, because it is active. It does more than wait to see what will be; it acts prior to proof. It is audacious.
The question that Sedlec wanted to ask me is simply this: Have you found a lasting hope? Despite the contradictions and discontinuities I found in Sedlec, the place has begun to make sense to me; its three-day resurrection myth is like a story that speaks of something bigger than itself. Thoreau, writing about a bean field, notes that the ear of wheat is in Latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope; and my mind jumps to Sedlec, because resurrection theories, starting from the grain of wheat onwards, are all about this one thing – a lasting hope.
Still I encounter a problem with the resurrection. For many people it is the mechanics of resurrection that seem incredible, but strangely enough it is not the question ‘how’ that most bothers me. The whole of human history is littered with things that were once deemed impossible. We know so much about matter and energy, but there is also much that we do not yet know and our knowledge is always changing. Five hundred years ago no one imagined light bulbs, or space travel, or genetic engineering. A decade or two ago saying we are made of stardust would have sounded like the stuff of a fairytale, and now it sounds like particle physics. So I do not find it hard to imagine the possibility of a bodily resurrection. Yet I do have a problem with the resurrection, and it is this: my belief in the possibility of resurrection does not remove the frustration of resurrection life seeming so far away. It is not so much the question ‘how’ as the question ‘when’.
This is not helped by the fact that resurrection life is spoken of almost exclusively as if it were about what happens after you are dead – heaven, hell, maybe purgatory; torments and rewards. Such a resurrection is often painted by the most confident believers as a stunning future prospect that somehow renders present difficulties insignificant – in fact, so insignificant that those difficulties need not be addressed; wrongs need not be righted now since they will be righted forever in the sweet by and by.
Not only does this seem unreal to me, it also angers me that the idea of ‘resurrection’ which could be transforming should be used to placate. We hear that ‘Life has conquered Death’ and yet we all die; victory is claimed, though that victory is always, it seems, eventual. Sometimes I want to stand up and shout: ‘Well if Jesus has won the victory why are we all in such a bloody mess?’ And what good does believing in life after death do if it means you just put off living? If hope is hushed frustration, what good is it? And who would want such a hope?
The kind of resurrection that starts happening now in the ordinary present is the kind that most captures my imagination. Resurrection life in which somehow future joy breaks in on the present, as if time wraps around itself and what will be actually happens. I have sometimes seen bold changes in which people’s lives are made new already, here, in this world, and the wonderful thing is that new life of that kind spills over. It spreads like watercolour soaking up across a glistening paper. This kind of resurrection hope makes me want to cheer.
I think about the many theories of resurrection just within Christianity and how, over thousands of years through images of seed and dust, the tension between continuity and transformation, those various resurrection theories are somehow never able entirely to leave behind the body. Many of us seem to have forgotten this, imagining, if we imagine it at all, life after death to be about a disembodied soul, a ghostly existence, something entirely spiritual. But my journey to Sedlec and the investigations to which it has led me remind me that whatever we mean by salvation is finally bound to a body.
This encourages me, for it helps me to see that my frustration with prevalent talk about the resurrection is not unfounded. Maybe it is right to be frustrated with an idea of resurrection that defers new life and takes it away from material reality. I have little idea what a resurrected body after death might be like, but I can have a very good idea of what a resurrected life might look like now. And that is something towards which one can turn.
To be hope at all (rather than some kind of vague optimism or fanciful dream) hope must have one foot in the mud. This is what I have come to understand. We think we need a dream. We are urged to ‘climb every mountain’ till we find it (roll Julie Andrews in slow motion on a mountain top). But what we really need is hope. Humans cannot live without it. We can do without many things: without holidays, without delicacies, without as much money as we thought we needed – even, as I have come lately to see, without the promise of a good prognosis. But we cannot live well for long without hope.
Hope is not the same thing as optimism. Optimism says that things will get better. Hope says that the good we envisage is the good we work towards. Optimism is largely passive: it is about waiting for what is better to come to you. Hope is active: it goes out and does. It falls and fails sometimes, but it is tenacious and unafraid, and it survives long after optimism is dashed. Optimism daydreams; hope has confidence. It is awake. It will not let go of the notion that the good is real, and that we can find it.
The three-day resurrection myth associated with the charnel house at Sedlec was what first invited me to discover more about the development of the doctrine of resurrection. The discontinuities there at Sedlec, between medieval mounds and Rint garlands, between the solemn and the frivolous, between the solidarity of anonymous skulls and the singular superiority of the Schwartzenburg crest, and the overarching question left unresolved – What are these bones, artist’s material or sleeping people? – disquieted my thoughts. Now, they seem to me somehow fitting conundrums in a charnel house devoted so specifically to the doctrine of the resurrection – a doctrine which, from its earliest days of debate over continuity and transformation, has been both subversive of the prevailing culture and tangled in paradox.