Chapel of Skulls

Vaclav Tomasek, parish priest at Czermna, began in 1776 to gather the bones that kept surfacing in the fields and mass graves around the village - the dead of the Thirty Years War, the Silesian wars and epidemics of cholera and plague - and to arrange them inside a small baroque chapel. Working with a gravedigger and a sexton over some twenty years he cleaned, sorted and set around three thousand skulls and long bones into the walls and ceiling in ordered rows, with a further twenty thousand or so stored in a crypt below. The chapel is small, and the effect is not gruesome so much as flat and overwhelming - continuous surfaces of bone. The remains of the three men who built it are in the chapel too. It is the only ossuary of this kind in Poland and one of only a handful in Europe. Visits are guided and short, photography is not allowed.

What you actually see

• Walls and ceiling of bone - about three thousand skulls set in ordered rows.
• A crypt below - roughly twenty thousand more remains stored beneath.
• The dead of specific wars - the Thirty Years War, the Silesian wars, epidemics.
• The builders themselves - the priest, gravedigger and sexton among the remains.

When to go

April to October. An hour.

Honest expectations

Some visitors find it genuinely distressing - this is human remains, not a display piece. Photography is forbidden. Visits are guided, short and to a timetable, and the chapel closes outside the season.

Nearby

Kudowa-Zdroj spa park is a short walk south.