bones

Sedlec Ossuary, or as it’s more commonly known, the Church of Bones, is an hour away from the capital of Czechia, Prague, and contains eight million individual bones

One of the most disturbing and dark tourist attractions is just three hours from the UK.

While Transylvania and Edinburgh may be go to’s for a gothic aesthetic among travellers looking for a spooky break, the travel experts at First Choice have found something a little darker and more grisly. Nestled in a rural Czech town just an hour from Prague, you’ll find the Sedlec Ossuary, or as it’s more commonly known, the Church of Bones.

The Roman Catholic chapel is decorated with the skeletal remains of between 40,000 – 70,000 individuals. In total, there are more than eight million individual bones in the cathedral of death.

The first Cistercian monastery in Bohemia, founded in 1142, is rich in history. In the 13th century, the spot became a popular burial ground after a monastery abbot consecrated the land with soil from the spot of Jesus’ crucifixion.

OPINION

Milo Boyd

By the 15th century, a new Gothic church had been built at the location, with the lower chapel re-assigned to house the tens of thousands of victims of the Black Plague and Hussite wars. But it was in the 19th century that the ossuary transformed into the creepy hotspot it is today.

Up until this point, the bones had been haphazardly stored in the various crypts, but in 1870 the monastery’s owners hired a local woodcarver named František Rint to artistically arrange the bones and give them a new sense of purpose.

Rint bleached the bones and used them to create the unique decorations visitors can see today, including:

The Chandelier of bones. This is a massive chandelier that hangs from the centre of the nave and is said to contain at least one of every bone in the human body.

Schwarzenberg coat of arms: A coat of arms made entirely of human bones, including a raven pecking the eye of a Turkish soldier’s skull.

Garlands of skulls that are strung from the ceiling.

Bone pyramids, which are four large, bell-shaped pyramids of stacked bones that occupy the corners of the chapel.

While Sedlec Ossuary makes for a perfect spooky Halloween day out, visitors are welcome all year round. In fact, the summer months make for a great time to visit as the chapel offers late-night, candle-lit tours hosted by monks and an organ performance.

Fans of Danny Boyle’s 2025 apocalyptic horror film 28 Years Later might find the spot particularly appealing – with various visual similarities to the film. And with part 2: The Bone Temple set to release in cinemas in Jan 2026, the spot is set to increase in popularity.

Situated in the town of Kutná Hora, a UNESCO World Heritage spot with a tonne of other historical sites to explore, the Ossuary is just over an hour from the capital of Prague making it a great option for a day trip out of the city.

Tours from Prague centre can be organised with travel companies like First Choice, which offers a day-long guided experience of Kutná Hora and the Sedlec Ossuary from just £63 per person, including transfers.

In Prague itself, dark tourists can try everything from ghost walks to concentration camp and abandoned psychiatric hospital tours. Visiting the capital can be very affordable, with stays including flights and accommodation starting at £188pp with First Choice, and food and drink famously on the lower end compared to similar historical capitals like Berlin and Paris.

Pick a stay at the Royal Court Hotel a 19th century royal residence building, now a modern day 4-star in the heart of the city. Prices start from £188pp, based on two adults sharing a double standard room, on a room-only basis for 2 nights, flights departing from London Stansted on 22 January 2026. Hand luggage only and transfers not included.

An early line from “Salt Bones,” the latest novel from talented poet and novelist Jennifer Givhan, reads, “Daughters disappear here.”

It is a line that haunts the Salton Sea region, where Givhan has set her latest novel and infuses the toxic air upon which her characters must survive. In other words, this warning to keep your daughters close clings to everything. It is in the air, but also — in this thriller that employs elements of magical realism and mystery — it is in the water, buffeting each of these characters with the cadence of windblown waves crashing against the shore.

The Salton Sea is just as much a character here as Givhan’s main protagonists: Mal, a mother of two daughters, and the two daughters themselves — Amaranta, in high school, and Griselda, a science major in college. Through them, we get a sense of this place, what it was, what it is and what it is becoming. A sea that evaporates and pulls back year after year, exposing a lake bed contaminated with agricultural runoff and revealing not just the bones of fish but also a painful history that many would rather remains beneath the water’s surface.

“Salt Bones” by Jennifer Givhan

(Mulholland Books)

El Valle, the fictional town that serves as the primary setting for “Salt Bones,” is haunted by what surrounds it. By the memories of the missing. Daughters like Mal’s own sister, Elena, who disappeared more than 20 years before.

Now with two daughters of her own, Mal is a butcher at the local carnicería. But when one of the workers at the shop, Renata, a young woman the same age as Mal’s eldest daughter, doesn’t show up for work one day, Mal begins to spiral into the past, questioning what she could have done differently, and then what she could do now. And, most of all, why does all of this seem to keep happening here in El Valle?

For Mal and her family, there is no escape. They are followed not just by memories, but also by Mal’s mother’s spite-fueled dementia, which returns all of them again and again to the fissures in time just before and just after the disappearance of Mal’s sister. And now, with Renata gone missing, there is nowhere to hide from the tragedy of this place, not at work, not at home and not even at the edges of the Salton Sea where Mal can sometimes find a tenuous peace.

But it is not just Mal who roams these shores, but La Siguanaba, a shape-shifter often associated with Central American and Mexican folklore, wearing “whatever a man lusts after most. Sequins. Spandex. Fishnet. Nothing at all.” And then after enticing these men to approach, this being — often described as a woman — turns and reveals the “white-boned skull of a horse” beneath her long dark hair.

“By the time they scream,” Givhan writes, “it’s too late.”

La Siguanaba is a cautionary tale and a myth to some in El Valle. She is a ghost story to keep the kids safe and away from danger, but to Mal, she is very real. La Siguanaba comes to her in dreams; in her waking hours, she lurks just beyond the light. Her smell — something like urine and unmucked stables — floats on the wind, acting like a warning, a memory, a message.

But all this — the monster in the shadows, the missing daughters and even a rising tension in El Valle over a lithium plant and a looming ecological disaster — is only part of the story. Mal can only know so much, and it is through the details revealed by Mal’s daughters, Amaranta and Griselda, that we begin to comprehend the depth of this story.

Like all good mysteries, there is a whole world just out of reach: secret lives, secrets kept, secrets used like currency. For us — the readers — the clues are there. Givhan does a wonderful job infusing the early pages with hints and observations from each of the three perspectives, Mal, Amaranta and Griselda, all of whom are hiding things from each other.

To the reader, who benefits from the combined knowledge of these characters, each perspective adds a different lens. Mal, with her mother’s intuition and almost otherworldly connection to La Siguanaba, Amaranta, who is the youngest and still very much a child and who sees what others don’t expect her to, and then Griselda, home from college, who looks on all of this with a fresh, almost outside perspective. All of them come to the same conclusion very early on: Something is very off in this small community.

“Salt Bones” is a worthy read. It’s a book infused with the language and culture of a strong Mexican American and Indigenous community. In some way, like La Siguanaba, it’s a conduit into another world. A complicated, real and very much welcome, if a bit scary, world.

And though the layering of information — of what we know, what remains hidden from us and what has been foreshadowed — does add up (delaying what becomes a propulsive search for the missing in the second half of the novel), Givhan’s talents as a writer of blunt, strong sentences and remarkable poetic passages regarding the landscape and the sea more than make up for any delay.

“Salt Bones” is a triumph. One of the most masterful marriages of horror, mystery, thriller and literary writing that I’ve read in some time. And it is certainly a book that will haunt you (in a good way!) for a very long time after you’ve turned the final page.

Waite is the author of four novels and a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Potocari, Bosnia and Herzegovina – In a grassy valley dotted with white gravestones, thousands of people gathered to mark 30 years since the Srebrenica massacre on Friday.

Seven victims of the 1995 genocide, some of whose remains were only discovered and exhumed in the past year from mass graves uncovered in Liplje, Baljkovica, Suljici and Kamenicko Brdo, were buried during the sombre anniversary on Friday.

Limited remains of one of the victims, Hasib Omerovic, who was 34 when he was killed, were found and exhumed from a mass grave in 1998, but his family delayed his burial until now, hoping to recover more.

Zejad Avdic, 46, is the brother of another of the victims being buried. Senajid Avdic was just 19 when he was killed on July 11, 1995. His remains were discovered in October 2010 at a site in Suljici, one of the villages attacked that day by Bosnian Serb forces.

“When the news came, at first, I couldn’t – I didn’t – dare tell my mother, my father. It was too hard,” Avdic told Al Jazeera, referring to the moment he learned that some of his brother’s remains had been found.

“What was found wasn’t complete, just a few bones from the skull.”

Families like Avdic’s have waited decades for even a fragment of bone to confirm their loved one’s death. Many have buried their loved ones with only partial remains.

The Srebrenica massacre was the crescendo of Bosnia’s three-year war from 1992 to 1995, which flared up in the aftermath of Yugoslava’s dissolution, pitting Bosnian Serbs against the country’s two other main ethnic populations – Croats and Muslim Bosniaks.

On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces stormed the enclave of Srebrenica, ​​a designated United Nations-protected safe zone, overrunning the Dutch UN battalion stationed there. They separated at least 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from their wives, mothers and sisters, slaughtering them en masse.

Thousands of men and boys attempted to escape through the surrounding woods, but Serb forces chased them through the mountainous terrain, killing and capturing as many as they could. Women and children were expelled from the city and neighbouring villages by bus.

Thousands of people attended the commemoration for victims of the massacre on Friday, which began with a congregational Islamic prayer – men, women and children prostrating in unison among the rows of gravestones.

After the prayer, the remains of the victims, who have been identified using extensive DNA analysis, were carried in green coffins draped with the Bosnian flag.

The coffins were lowered into newly prepared graves. At each site, groups of men stepped forward to take turns covering the caskets with soil, shovelling from nearby mounds in a solemn conclusion to the proceedings.

After the remains had been buried, the victims’ families crowded around the sites, wiping away their tears as an imam recited verses over the caskets.

‘I will keep coming as long as I’m alive’

Fikrera Tuhljakovic, 66, attends the memorial here each year, but this year her cousin was among the victims being buried.

She said she is determined to ensure he is remembered and that all of the victims are never forgotten.

“I will keep coming as long as I’m alive,” Tuhljakovic told Al Jazeera.

Forensic scientists and the International Commission on Missing Persons have, in the decades since the mass killings, worked to locate the remains of those killed.

More than 6,000 victims have been buried at the memorial site in Potocari, but more than 1,000 remain missing.

In 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared the events in Srebrenica and the surrounding area a genocide. Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were both convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison.

In total, the tribunal and courts in the Balkans have sentenced almost 50 Bosnian Serb wartime officials to more than 700 years in prison for the genocide.

But many accused remain unpunished. Denial of the genocide also continues – especially among political leaders in Serbia and the Serb-majority entity of Republika Srpska, which was established in the northeast of the country at the start of the war in 1992 with the stated aim of protecting the interests of the Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

According to Emir Cica, Islamic Relief’s Bosnia country director, international institutions have not done enough to prevent events like Srebrenica from happening again, with similar atrocities happening in Gaza at the moment.

“When we see what has happened, for example, in Gaza, it is very painful for us because we understand this [experience],” Cica told Al Jazeera.

For Avdic, Gaza is indeed a painful reminder of history repeating itself.

“Today we are burying our victims of genocide, and today in Gaza, genocide is happening, too,” he said solemnly.

“I don’t know what kind of message to send; there’s no effect on those in power who could actually do something.”

When the world calls you “Little Al,” you’re going to do what it takes to be seen.

That’s what I thought after spending an hour last week at the Porsche Experience Center in Carson with the city’s former mayor, Albert Robles.

He’s not the Albert Robles who was found guilty 19 years ago of fleecing South Gate out of $20 million as treasurer — that’s Big Al Robles. Little Al is the one who has tried to be a political somebody in L.A. County for over 30 years, only to almost always fall short, his career careening from one controversy to another.

In 2006, he represented three men who moved to Vernon in an attempt to take over the City Council; they all lost. That same year, Little Al represented Big Al — no, they’re not actually related — at the latter’s sentencing and argued that his client deserved leniency since what he did was common in California politics. The presiding judge replied, “What you have just said is among the most absurd things I have ever heard.”

Then-Carson Mayor Al Robles during a Carson City Council meeting at City Hall in 2015.

(Los Angeles Times)

The year after he was elected Carson’s mayor in 2015, the Fair Political Practices Commission fined Robles $12,000 to resolve allegations of campaign finance law violations. Two years after that, Robles’ 24-year tenure on the board of directors for Water Replenishment District of Southern California — an obscure agency that provides water for 44 cities in L.A. County — ended after a Superior Court judge ruled he couldn’t hold that seat at the same time that he was serving as mayor.

He lost the mayoral seat in the 2020 general election after striking out in his bid for county supervisor in the primary election earlier that year. Robles has been unsuccessful in two other races since — for an L.A. County Superior Court seat in 2022, and a state Senate primary last year where he garnered just 8.5% of the vote.

“I keep thinking I’m done and then I’m not done,” the 56-year-old joked at one point in our conversation as Caymans and Carreras roared through the test track as we lounged in a nearby patio. “It’s kind of like they dragged me back in.”

We met to talk about his latest waltz with the headlines: He’s the lawyer for former Huntington Park Councilmember Esmeralda Castillo. She’s suing the city to get her seat back after an internal investigation found Castillo wasn’t a resident of the southeast L.A. County suburb. The council declared the seat vacant and then picked a replacement.

“Whether or not she lives in [Huntington Park], whether or not she’s an angel, whether or not she’s Charles Manson, that doesn’t matter: She was denied the process that all of us are entitled to,” Robles said.

Um, Manson?

He’s also representing another former Huntington Park council member, Valentin Amezquita, in another lawsuit against the city. That one demands the city hold a special election for Castillo’s former seat, which Amezquita unsuccessfully applied for.

Wait, aren’t the lawsuits contradicting each other?

A judge told him the same thing, Robles admitted. He told me he filed them to expose what he described as Huntington Park’s “hypocrisy” for supposedly following the city charter over the Castillo matter, but ignoring it when choosing her replacement.

“It’s just like what’s happening at the federal level, as far as I see it,” Robles grumbled. Earlier, he compared the lack of due process Castillo allegedly faced to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national illegally deported by the Trump administration to his home country. “It’s frustrating.”

The more he talked, the more it became evident Robles wants to be seen as the crusader he’s always imagined himself to be and is annoyed that he’s not.

Carson Mayor Albert Robles speaks during a hearing about a proposed $480-million desalination plant in El Segundo in 2019 at the Carson Event Center.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

His grievances are many.

He continues to hold a grudge against former L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, whom he described as “corrupt … and I’ll call him that to his face.” Cooley, for his part, told The Times in 2013 that when Robles unsuccessfully ran against him in 2008, he was “probably the most unqualified candidate ever” because of his political past.

Robles bragged that he torpedoed Cooley’s career.

“It’s an exaggeration — over-embellishment — on my part, but I actually take credit for” Cooley losing his 2010 bid to become California attorney general. “Because when I ran against him, I caused him to spend money — money that he otherwise would have had for the AG race. And if [Cooley] had that additional half a million dollars that he had to spend for the DA race, he may have won.”

He thinks Latino politicians need to close ranks like he feels other ethnicities do.

Case in point: Operation Dirty Pond, an L.A. County district attorney probe into a long-delayed Huntington Park aquatic park. In February, investigators raided City Hall and the homes of seven individuals, including two former council members and two current ones. Robles said the probe doesn’t “make sense” and is further proof that Latino politicians are held to a higher standard than other politicians.

“If Esmeralda were Black or Asian, or hell — dare I say — even white, I think it would be reported differently. I honestly believe that. Because those communities are willing to set aside their differences for the better good, because they know that, hey, if one person is being mistreated, we all are.”

Once he realized I wanted to discuss his own political travails as much as of his clients, Robles said the better setting for our chat would’ve been the Albert Robles Center, a water treatment center in Pico Rivera that opened in 2019.

“That structure, you know, everyone loves it now. Everyone celebrates that it’s there. But surprise, surprise: not one environmental group, not one came out and supported our effort to build it up. … Nobody fought more for that building, for that project, than me.”

This set off more grievances.

Robles was bitter that L.A.’s “Latino power elite” hadn’t listened to him and invested more time and effort in the South Bay, where Latinos make up a majority of the population in many cities but have little political representation.

“They just see us as differently and the resources to organize and build up that political power base never materialized,” he said. “I don’t know if they see it as ‘Oh, those are more affluent communities, they don’t need our help.’ I don’t know.”


He was also “disheartened” by Black residents that opposed district elections in Carson that would have probably brought more Latinos onto the council. They were introduced in 2020 after a lawsuit alleged Latino voters were disenfranchised in the city. Since then, there hasn’t been a Latino elected to the City Council.

“We would have members of the African American community come up and say, ‘Well, we have a Latino mayor. We don’t need districts. Latinos should vote — stop speaking Spanish, and learn to vote.’ And then I would say, ‘You know, everything you’re saying is what whites said about Blacks in the South. And they’re like, ‘That’s not true.’
So, like, some forgot their history and now we seem to have fallen into the politics of, ‘If it’s not us, it can’t be them.’”

We climbed upstairs to the Porsche Experience Center’s viewing deck so Robles could pose for photos. Workers at the venue’s restaurant greeted him, drawing the first genuine smile Robles had flashed all afternoon.

He then mentioned that somewhere in the building was his name. I thought it would be on a plaque commemorating the debut of the Porsche Experience Center in 2016, when Robles was mayor. But it turned out to be his John Hancock alongside a bunch of others on a whiteboard in a room facing the parking lot.

The room was locked.

Robles wondered out loud if he should ask the staff to open it so we could take a better look. Instead, we peered through a window.

“It’s right there,” he told me, trying to describe where exactly it was among all the other signatures. “Well, you’re not familiar with it so you probably can’t see it.”

He could.