This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Czech Republic gathers two Bohemian cities whose religious history diverged sharply, one built on doctrinal reform and the other, more literally, on bone.
Prague was the seat of the Bohemian reform movement that formed around Jan Hus, whose burning at Constance in 1415 set off the Hussite wars and produced a church separate from Rome a century before Luther. Its Jewish quarter is among the oldest in Europe, with the Old New Synagogue in continuous use since the thirteenth century and the burial place of Judah Loew, the Maharal, to whom later legend attached the golem. Under Rudolf II the imperial court drew alchemists, astronomers and astrologers, among them John Dee, Edward Kelley, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.
Kutna Hora is a medieval silver mining town whose wealth funded ambitious church architecture, and whose Sedlec Ossuary, a small Gothic chapel decorated almost entirely in arranged human bone, has made it one of Europe's most visited memento mori sites. The bones, estimated at the remains of forty to seventy thousand people, were gathered from a cemetery local tradition holds was sanctified with earth from Golgotha in the thirteenth century, so desirable a burial ground that plague and the Hussite wars filled it to overflowing. A woodcarver named Frantisek Rint was hired in 1870 to arrange the resulting remains into the chandeliers and garlands still on display today.
One city argued its way out of Rome's authority in the language of theology; the other, filled by the same centuries of plague and war, answered in the language of bone.