Hallstatt, Austria

After three days in Vienna we headed to the small town of Hallstatt, Austria in the Salzkammergut Lake District. It's a tiny town of about 1000 and three thousand years ago this area was the salt-mining capital of Europe. It was very peaceful and extremely scenic. The most interesting thing in Hallstatt for me was their Bone Chapel. Quoting from Rick Steves, "Land is limited - so limited that in the church cemetery, bones received only 12 years of peaceful subterranean darkness before making way for the newly dead. The result is a fascinating chapel (Beinhaus) of decorated bones. Each of the more than 600 skulls is lovingly named, dated, and decorated with ivy and rose motifs. This practice was stopped in the 1960s, about the time the Catholic Church began permitting cremation." The newest skull is from 1983 and the woman specified that she wanted her bones placed in the chapel.