Sedlec abbey was founded in 1142, the first Cistercian house in Bohemia, and the town owes its existence to it: systematic mining began in the 1260s after silver ore was found on the abbey’s land, and the rush that followed made Kutná Hora. The abbey church went up between 1290 and 1320, and it is not a monastery chapel — it is a cathedral, built on the northern French plan with an ambulatory and a ring of radiating chapels, the first building of that type in central Europe and for a time the largest church in Bohemia. Count the windows: there are 106, and the one in the west front is 14 m high, which is why the interior is startlingly bright for a Gothic building.
In 1421 the Hussites sacked and burned it. The roof went, the abbey was broken, and the church stood as a ruin for the better part of three hundred years. When the Cistercians finally rebuilt, they gave the job to Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel, who between 1703 and 1708 did something no one else was doing in Europe: instead of dressing the medieval shell in fashionable Baroque, he continued it. His vaults are 18th-century ribs drawn in a 14th-century hand — star and net patterns, Gothic proportions, Baroque plasterwork — the style now called Baroque Gothic, and Sedlec is where he worked it out.
So be clear-eyed about what you are looking at. The medieval part is the shell: the plan, the piers, the height, the light. The surfaces, the furnishings and the paintings are of about 1700. That is still worth the walk, because standing in the nave tells you exactly how much money a Cistercian house sitting on a silver seam could raise around 1300.
Practically, it is on the same “Areál Sedlec” ticket as the ossuary and keeps the same hours, and it is a working parish church, so services close it. The timed-entry rule and the photography ban apply to the ossuary’s lower chapel, not here. It was inscribed with the rest of Kutná Hora on the UNESCO list in 1995.
