Sedlec Ossuary

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Chapel interior

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A Czech church decorated with 40,000 human skeletons arranged into chandeliers, garlands, and a coat of arms — all assembled by a half-blind monk in 1870. The bones had to come from somewhere.

When Duccio's Maestà was carried from his workshop to Siena Cathedral on June 9, 1311, all shops in the city closed, bells rang, and the entire population walked in procession behind it — the largest panel painting of its age, at 5 metres wide, entering the city like a sovereign.

Isao Machii, a modern iaijutsu master, sliced a 200 mph BB pellet clean in two mid-air — his sword completing the cut before his conscious brain could have processed the pellet's position.

Voltaire scrawled 'absurd' across his personal Bible hundreds of times, then predicted Christianity would be extinct within a century. His Geneva house became a Bible Society depot 50 years after his death.

Elderly Arab men, per medieval accounts, volunteered to subsist entirely on honey until their flesh was saturated — then, after death and 100 years of submersion in honey, their preserved corpses were sold as medicine.

Cyrus conquered Lydia, Babylon, and Media within 20 years, freed 40,000 Jewish captives from Babylon by decree, and died fighting nomads — whose queen, Tomyris, allegedly dunked his severed head in blood.

A single bomb hidden in a SuperFerry's cargo hold on August 2, 2004 killed 116 people in Manila Bay — the deadliest peacetime maritime attack in recorded history. Abu Sayyaf planted it for $400.

Hamilcar Barca made his nine-year-old son Hannibal swear eternal war on Rome over a sacrificial animal's bleeding entrails — then spent the rest of his life building Spain into a weapon for that oath.

Greek king Menander I ruled a Buddhist kingdom in modern Pakistan around 150 BCE. He debated Buddhist monks so rigorously that, at his death, multiple cities demanded his ashes — and split them, relic by relic, like the Buddha himself.