After being rediscovered in 2000 and carefully restored in the past years, the ossuary beneath the St. James church opens this Friday.
Until the 18th century, the place served as an “archive” of bones of people buried at a small nearby cemetery – so the graves could host fresh corpses. The ossuary was almost forgotten in the modern ages but then literally brought back to the light by local historian Aleš Svoboda.
The underground labyrinth contains bones of 50,000, making it the second largest ossuary in Europe after the Catacombs of Paris. It has a small chapel, decorated only by skulls and bones.
Tickets cost CZK 140, which to me is a fair price, and the ossuary is open daily from 9.30 a.m. to 6 p.m. except Monday. No one from the Tourist Centre answers my e-mails about tours in foreign languages, so I’ll try to ask them in person as soon as I can.
More about the ossuary
a Wikipedia post, a gallery at iBrno, a great article at radio.cz, a post at Atlas Obscura, an offical website. Photo property of Wikimedia Commons.
Map
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I’m not sure about full tours in languages other than Czech, but when I visited the ossuary in early December I was given a bilingual Czech/English leaflet and allowed to show myself around. The two girls working the ticket desk when I went there spoke quite good English.