In which the most interesting aspects of Brno are underneath its streets, not above.
On first glance, Brno seems like your typical Eastern European metropolis with it’s sprawling streets, austere buildings and signs of neglect and disrepair spreading like vines across the once grand and imposing façades. Spend some time getting to know it, however, and you will soon find the maze of tunnels, chambers and tombs that form a secondary city below.
Under the main market square in the city centre, you can venture through a network of storage cellars initially built by the cities merchants. As the original cellars and tunnels grew, they eventually connected and formed the labyrinth that exists today. Over 200 steps down, you descend into the darkness and pass through exhibits showing methods of food storage, an alchemist’s laboratory and finally the prison and torture chambers. The atmosphere changes steadily as you wind through the warren of brick and earth; the air feels damn and oppressive, cold and heavy, uttered words amplify and reverberate along the tunnels. When you eventually emerge from the depths, you breathe the crisp, fresh air of the surface with renewed appreciation. For each corridor and rampart above ground there is a subterranean counterpart mirrored below, the prisons and torture rooms it's dark reflection.
Even the cities pubs are found not lining the streets at ground level, but behind thick wooden doors, down smokey stairways; nothing to indicate their existence but the muffled voices drifting from the cracks as you pass by.
To continue your exploration of Brno’s underworld, the Ossuary under one of the city’s churches—only discovered in 2001—is a tomb filled with the remains of around 50 thousand people. Today you can wander a section of this crypt, the walls lined with endless skulls, gazing at you from the void of their eye sockets. One is never more confronted with the blunt material nature of our existence than when watched by hundreds of faces stripped of the warmth of human flesh, now mere calcified clockwork indistinguishable from the individuals beside them. The spherical vessels that once held desires, dreams, fears and worries now sit in a row, providing morbid decor, empty but for gathered dust and the poignancy of their symbolism.
