Medieval silver boom town — Gothic cathedrals, a bone church, and 14th-century royal mint
Kutná Hora was once the second most important city in Bohemia, its silver mines funding the Bohemian kings and bankrolling Gothic architecture on a royal scale. Today the UNESCO-listed town is best known for two contrasting landmarks: the soaring five-nave St Barbara's Cathedral — a rival to Prague's St Vitus in ambition — and the Sedlec Ossuary, a small chapel whose every surface is decorated with the artistically arranged bones of 40,000–70,000 people. The medieval Italian Court (Vlašský dvůr), where Bohemian silver coins were minted from the 13th century, adds a third pillar to one of Cent…
Silver was discovered near Kutná Hora around 1260, and within decades it was producing one-third of all silver mined in Europe, funding Bohemia's kings from Václav II onward. The town's name derives from a monk's cowl (kuta) — legend says a Cistercian monk saw an angel marking the first silver seam. The mining boom ended in the 17th century as veins exhausted; the town was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.