Brno: the ossuary beneath the Church of St James

Czech Republic's second-largest city, Brno hides below one of its churches the second-largest ossuary in Europe after the Paris catacombs.

The historic center is visited on foot, while trams cover longer distances to peripheral neighborhoods.

The Špilberk, a thirteenth-century fortress transformed into a prison during Habsburg rule, dominates the city from atop its hill.

Descending toward the center, you visit the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, whose bells ring noon an hour earlier by tradition, commemorating a seventeenth-century Swedish siege.

Beneath the nearby Church of St. James, the Ossuary of Brno, reopened to the public only in 2001, holds the remains of approximately fifty thousand people.

Toward evening, the Villa Tugendhat, a 1930 rationalist masterpiece by Mies van der Rohe and a UNESCO site, concludes the day among the city's modernist architecture.

According to legend, the cathedral bells rang noon an hour early to trick the Swedish army, which believed according to a pact that if it had not conquered the city by noon it would withdraw: since then the tradition repeats every day.

Brno's ossuary remained forgotten for centuries beneath the city before being rediscovered and opened to the public only in the early 2000s, despite containing human remains accumulated since the Middle Ages.