Sedlec Cathedral

Sedlec Cathedral tickets: which one to buy

This is the large church in Sedlec, on the northern edge of Kutna Hora, and it is almost always bought as part of a combined ticket with the bone chapel five minutes away and, in the fuller version, with Saint Barbara's church across town. Buy the combination rather than separate entries; it is cheaper and the three buildings only make sense together. Day trips from Prague, an hour away by train or coach, use exactly that route.

The mistake many visitors make is to treat this church as an afterthought to the ossuary and give it ten minutes, when it is the more important building of the two. Independent travel is easy: the Sedlec stop is the first one in town coming from Prague, so start here and walk or take a local bus into the centre afterwards. Guided tours are worth it for the architectural argument alone, since this church is the reason a whole style has a name.

Visiting Sedlec Cathedral: what to see

A Cistercian abbey was founded here in 1142, the first in Bohemia, and its church was built on a French cathedral plan on a scale nothing else in the country matched. The Hussite wars wrecked it in 1421 and it stood as a ruin for nearly three centuries. The rebuilding, carried out between 1700 and 1708, is what makes the building extraordinary.

Jan Blazej Santini-Aichel was given the shell and chose neither to restore it as Gothic nor to replace it with baroque, but to invent a hybrid: Gothic ribs, pointed windows and soaring proportions handled with baroque plasticity, curving balustrades and light, and a plaster vault that reads as medieval from the floor and as eighteenth-century from close up. He used the same idea later at Zdar and Kladruby, and the style is now named after him. The interior is white and enormously high, with paintings by Petr Brandl and a monstrance displayed in the treasury. The abbey buildings next door became a tobacco factory and still are one.

Sedlec Cathedral opening hours and the best time to go

The church and the ossuary keep the same hours, with a shorter winter timetable and a midday break on some days. Mornings are much the quieter half of the day, because the Prague coaches arrive around eleven and the bone chapel has a timed-entry system that pushes people through in waves. Photography inside the ossuary is restricted; here it is not. The white interior needs daylight and is dull in the late afternoon in winter.

Silver mining made this town rich, and the mining museum and the medieval centre justify a full day rather than the three hours most tours allocate. Kutna Hora has two stations and the one you want for Sedlec is the main one, not the town halt. Advent brings markets to the central squares. Allow forty minutes here, twenty at the ossuary, and keep the walk between them rather than taking the shuttle, since it passes the old abbey wall.