Czeching out

I'm looking Death in the eye, and Death is looking back at me. Strangely, it doesn't seem as creepy or disturbing as it should.

I'm standing beneath Jakubske Square, in the eastern Czech city of Brno, gazing at a thick circular column of human skulls and bones. They're brown with age and rise all the way from the floor to the ceiling of this cool, dimly lit chamber.

Nearby are two skeletons in caskets, with a wall of bones behind them. Soft instrumental music plays as I shuffle among a small group of hushed onlookers peering at these reminders of mortality.

There's no shortage of such memento mori in St James' Ossuary (entry $7). For almost 200 years, these underground chambers functioned as a final depository for those buried in the cemetery of St James' Church. When the cemetery became full, older bones were moved here.

After the cemetery was paved over in 1784, the macabre storehouse was forgotten. Then a routine archaeological dig in 2001 discovered a vast collection of 50,000 skeletons, second only to the famous catacombs of Paris.

The remains were in such an advanced state of decay, they were collapsing, causing a cavity that could one day swallow the square and the trams that run across it. The solution took more than a decade to implement: the bones were temporarily removed, the ossuary was strengthened and ventilated, then the human remains were returned.

What's fascinating is their arrangement in patterns, and the specially commissioned pieces of art that turn this bone storehouse into a place of contemplation.

As I stand in a side corridor, which ends in a tiered arrangement of skulls, what I'm mostly contemplating is whether this place is disrespectful to the dead.

The individuals who once owned these bones had already been rendered anonymous by being moved from the churchyard centuries ago, I reason. The artworks — typified by a striking rendition of Charon, the ancient Greek ferryman of the dead — seem tasteful, the music soothing, and the arranged bones thought-provoking.