🇨🇿 Czechia · Prague and central Bohemia
Some towns look small and yet hold an enormous history. Kutná Hora is one of them. A little over an hour from Prague, this town of cobbled streets and Gothic houses was, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one of the richest and most populous places in Bohemia, a direct rival to the capital. The secret? Silver. Beneath its streets lay one of the most important silver deposits in medieval Europe, and from those mines came the coin — the famous 'Prague groschen' — that sustained the whole kingdom.
That wealth left an extraordinary heritage that is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. St Barbara's Cathedral, dedicated precisely to the patron saint of miners, is a masterpiece of the late Gothic, with its star-ribbed vaults and its flying buttresses that look like stone lace. On the outskirts, in the Sedlec district, is one of the most striking places in the country: the Ossuary, a chapel decorated with the bones of tens of thousands of people, including a chandelier made entirely from human remains.
This guide covers Kutná Hora calmly and fondly: how to get there from Prague, how to combine the Sedlec ossuary with the centre, which tickets are worth buying, where to eat and why it is worth staying the night, if you can, to experience the town without the crowds. It is one of the most rewarding trips in the whole of Czechia, and a different way of understanding the medieval past of the heart of Europe.
Kutná Hora was born at the end of the thirteenth century around the discovery of rich silver deposits. Mining drew German and Bohemian miners, and the place grew at astonishing speed. In 1300, King Wenceslas II issued the Ius regale montanorum (a pioneering mining code) and centralised the kingdom's coinage at the Italian Court (Vlašský dvůr) in Kutná Hora, where the Prague groschen (Pražský groš) was struck, one of the most prestigious silver coins in Europe. The town became the second most important in Bohemia after Prague and funded the building of churches and palaces. In the fifteenth century it was a stage of the Hussite wars. Its St Barbara's Cathedral, begun around 1388 and inspired in part by the workshop of Peter Parler (the architect of St Vitus Cathedral in Prague), stands for the pride of the miners. The exhaustion of the seams and, above all, the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century marked its decline: the mines closed and the mint stopped working in 1727. The extraordinary Sedlec ossuary, in a chapel of the old Cistercian monastery, was decorated with thousands of bones from the end of the eighteenth century onwards by the woodcarver František Rint. In 1995 the historic centre of Kutná Hora with St Barbara's Cathedral and the church of the Assumption of Our Lady in Sedlec were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political and spiritual heart of Czechia: the imperial Prague of Charles IV, the city of Jan Hus and of the defenestrations, Kafka's old Jewish ghetto, the stage of 1968 and of the Velvet Revolution, and the medieval silver of Kutná Hora.
Read the history of Prague and central Bohemia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Kutná Hora is written, literally, in silver. Until the thirteenth century, the area was barely a landscape of forests and small villages around the Cistercian monastery of Sedlec, founded in 1142. Everything changed when, at the end of that century, rich seams of silver were found in these hills. The news spread like wildfire across central Europe and set off a true 'silver rush': miners, merchants and adventurers, many of them German-speaking, arrived en masse to try their luck.
Within a few decades, a chaotic and vital settlement grew around the mine shafts and turned into a town. The name itself, Kutná Hora, points to that activity: 'hora' means 'mountain' or 'hill' in Czech, but it also refers to mining work, and 'kutná' is linked to the word for the monks' cowl or, according to other readings, to the act of digging (kutat). The town was born, then, from turned earth and from the wealth hidden beneath its feet.
The mining was extraordinarily intense: the mines of Kutná Hora are thought to have produced an enormous share of all Europe's silver at their peak. That abundance quickly made the town a first-rank economic centre within the kingdom of Bohemia, able to fund churches, palaces and monumental works, and to attract the direct attention of the crown.
Kutná Hora's great leap came at the hands of King Wenceslas II of Bohemia. In the year 1300 the monarch took two decisions that would change the economic history of the kingdom and make Kutná Hora its monetary heart. The first was to issue the Ius regale montanorum, a very thorough mining code that regulated ownership, the working of the mines, the rights of the miners and the crown's share. It was one of the most advanced pieces of mining legislation in the Europe of its time and served as a model in other countries.
The second decision was to centralise all the kingdom's coinage in Kutná Hora, in a building that would come to be called the Italian Court (Vlašský dvůr). The name comes from the expert minters brought from Florence ('the Italians') whom the king charged with the reform. There the Prague groschen (Pražský groš) began to be struck, a solid silver coin that became one of the most respected currencies in central Europe for centuries, accepted in markets far away.
The Italian Court was both mint and royal residence. The wealth of the silver and the control of the coinage gave Kutná Hora enormous political power: the town became the second in Bohemia after Prague, and its affairs mattered directly to the king. The silver of Kutná Hora funded much of the Bohemian crown and made the region one of the most prosperous on the continent.
Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Kutná Hora lived its golden age. It was a rich, populous and proud town that in many ways rivalled Prague itself. Burghers enriched by silver built stone houses, founded institutions and funded works of art. The supreme symbol of that pride was the building of St Barbara's Cathedral, dedicated to the patron saint of miners, whose construction began around 1388.
It was no accident that the people of Kutná Hora wanted a cathedral comparable to St Vitus in Prague. In fact the direction of the work was linked to the workshop of Peter Parler, the same great master of St Vitus, and later architects of the stature of Matěj Rejsek and Benedikt Ried, author of the spectacular rib vaults, took part. For centuries the cathedral was a statement of power and devotion by a town that lived on silver and that commended itself to St Barbara for protection from the dangers of the mine.
Kutná Hora was also a stage of Bohemia's political and religious history. In the fifteenth century, during the Hussite wars that shook the kingdom, the town — mostly Catholic and with a strong population of German origin — stood against the Hussites, and the region lived through very violent episodes. Religious tensions, wars and the first difficulties in the mines began to signal that this prosperity would not be eternal.
Like all wealth based on a natural resource, that of Kutná Hora had a limit. Through the sixteenth century the most accessible silver seams began to run out, and extracting the metal became ever harder and costlier: it meant digging to enormous depths, fighting flooded galleries and facing technical problems for which the age had no solution. Silver production, once fabulous, fell away irreversibly.
To this were added historical catastrophes. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which devastated much of central Europe and the Czech lands in particular, hit Kutná Hora hard with looting, epidemics and economic crisis. The town, which had been the second in Bohemia, lost population, importance and splendour. The royal mint, which for centuries had struck the kingdom's coin at the Italian Court, finally ceased its activity: coin production ended in 1727.
Kutná Hora thus became a provincial town living in the shadow of its glorious past. Paradoxically, that decline helped preserve its heritage: with no economic dynamism to demolish and rebuild, the town kept its medieval layout, its Gothic churches and its historic houses almost intact. What was an economic misfortune became, centuries later, its greatest tourist and cultural treasure.
One of the most singular chapters in the history of Kutná Hora was not written in silver but in bone. It all began in 1278, when Henry (Jindřich), abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Sedlec, was sent to the Holy Land and, by tradition, brought back a handful of earth from Golgotha, the hill of the crucifixion in Jerusalem. The abbot scattered that sacred earth over the monastery cemetery, which turned the graveyard into one of the most desirable places to be buried in the whole of central Europe.
Over the following centuries, the great Black Death epidemics (above all that of the fourteenth century) and the Hussite wars of the fifteenth filled that cemetery with tens of thousands of bodies. Space became insufficient, and the bones exhumed to make room for new burials piled up in a chapel. For a long time those remains were simply stacked, forming mountains of bone.
The transformation into a work of art came in the nineteenth century. Around 1870 the Schwarzenberg family, who owned the site, commissioned the woodcarver František Rint to organise and decorate the ossuary. From the remains of between 40,000 and 70,000 people Rint created the compositions that astonish visitors today: garlands of skulls, pyramids of bone, the Schwarzenberg coat of arms and, above all, a great chandelier which is said to include at least one of every bone in the human body. Rint left his own signature made of bone. The result is an overwhelming memento mori that has become one of the most visited places in the Czech Republic.
Definitive recognition of Kutná Hora's value came in 1995, when UNESCO inscribed on its World Heritage List the site formed by the town's historic centre together with St Barbara's Cathedral and the church (cathedral) of the Assumption of Our Lady in Sedlec. The distinction recognises the exceptionally well-preserved ensemble of a medieval mining town that was, at its height, one of the richest in Europe, and the extraordinary Gothic heritage that wealth made possible.
The listing particularly valued St Barbara's Cathedral, a masterpiece of the central European late Gothic, and the Assumption church in Sedlec, a magnificent example of the singular 'baroque Gothic' style of the architect Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel, who rebuilt it at the beginning of the eighteenth century while respecting the original Gothic forms. The medieval street plan, the historic houses and the traces of mining complete an urban landscape of the highest value.
Today Kutná Hora is one of the favourite trips from Prague, little more than an hour away by train. Every year it receives crowds who come, above all, to see the famous Sedlec ossuary and St Barbara's Cathedral. The town has managed to keep its character: outside the peak hours of the day trippers, its cobbled streets, its squares and its corners recover the calm of a historic town that holds, in every stone, the memory of the silver that once made it a rival to the kingdom's capital.