Kutná Hora Day Trip

While I was in the Czech Republic, I took a day trip to Kutná Hora.  I went on Saturday, which was Christmas Eve.  It was an interesting trip.  It was fun to see people walking through the streets carrying bags of Christmas presents.  It felt very festive.  It was also fun to see the rural bits of the Czech Republic.  It looks very different from the Netherlands.  If you look at this link, you can see the map I made for this trip.  Below is a picture of it.

The Ossuary is at the top right corner and St. Barbara Cathedral is down at the lower left.  Conveniently, there are three train stations near Kutná Hora so I didn't have to walk all the way around to get back.



This is the main train station at Kutná Hora.  It isn't a very large or a very busy town.









Even though the city is a little more run down than Prague, there were still a lot of the same kind of architectural sights around.

This is a map of the city that is built into the sidewalk periodically throughout the city.  I took this picture at a map outside of St. Barbara's Cathedral, if you'll notice the little red "you are here" dot in the lower left corner.  To note the relative size of the cathedral and the Jesuit College which is next to it, the Jesuit college is the large backwards "F" shaped building just north of the cathedral.

Kutna Hora is a city that dates from the early Middle Ages.  It was founded because of the presence of silver and grew as a mining community and then later as a religious center because of the Jesuit College.  During the summer you can go down into the old abandoned silver mines.  I had thought that might be kind of interesting to see and felt a little bad that I didn't get the chance to go down into them.  But then I read the official guide to the mines and what is like down there (you can read the whole page here).  The tour lasts an hour and a half and you walk through a drift that is 800 feet long (almost three football fields!) where "the path is sometimes very narrow and it is necessary to walk sideways."  After that I wasn't sad about missing the mine trip anymore.  If you want to read more about the Kutna Hora silver mines (albeit in somewhat awkward translations) you can read about "ore mining in Kutna Hora" here, "how the silver was mined" here, and about "Kutna Hora coinage" here.

What I am kind of sad to miss, though, was the Alchemy Museum.  (Lots of stuff in Kutna Hora is only open during the summer tourist season.)  The museum is devoted to magical stuff, how to make gold out of lead, and more basic, vaguely magical medieval understandings of science generally.  If you go here you can see a description of the museum by someone called "The Grumpy Traveler" (the name strikes me as fun).  The writing is a little more florid than I would normally go for but it is interesting nonetheless.