Brno Ossuary: A building made from human bones

Czechia has many underground attractions, including giant water tanks, tunnel networks underneath market squares, and limestone caves. But few of the subterranean adventures are quite as macabre as Brno's Ossuary.

The crypt is next to St James's Church, a little north of Náměstí Svobody. Down some stairs, as if to a metro station, is the entrance to the largest collection of bones outside Paris's Catacombs. There are said to be the remains of 50,000 people here, their skulls and femurs and other bony bits rearranged with grisly artifice into columns, pillars, walls and vaults.

Yet the atmosphere is not one of fatalistic gloom - more one of wry acceptance of mortality. The chirpy staff are surprisingly upbeat about it all, in a characteristically Czech way. The church itself is a more positively glorious experience: one of Brno's, indeed Moravia's, grandest Baroque church interiors. You can also go up to the restored attic for a multimedia exhibition, and climb the bell tower for superb panoramas over Brno itself.