Bruges, Ypres and Flanders' Fields

Bruges

When one moves from the Netherlands to Belgium, not much changes except the religion of the majority of the population (Catholic instead of Protestant) and the language a little bit (from Dutch to Flemish).  All through the heyday of these cities from the 13th to the 17th century, they were governed by the Duke of Flanders or the Duke of Burgundy or the Holy Roman Emperor.  [One of my favorite history jokes is that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, Roman nor an Empire.  It's just that the Pope got to appoint the Emperor.]  In any event, the landscape and architecture are very similar.  It is a pleasure to walk these cobblestoned streets.  Many of them are pedestrianized, but the bikes can be just as lethal as the cars.  It is rough walking but so worth it.

Bruges City Hall

Michaelangelo Madonna & Child

Bruges was an enormously successful cloth center in the Renaissance and extremely wealthy as a result.  The public buildings, such as the City Hall with its enormous tower, are ostentatious and designed to impress.  There is a cathedral with a Michelangelo madonna and child sculpture. It was made for a higher niche in an Italian church, but nabbed by the good folk of Bruges when something about the commission fell through.  As a result, the proportions of Mary and Jesus are a little off since it is now situated at eye level.  Even second hand, I think it's lovely.

Basilica at Bruges

Beguinage Cottages

The good burghers of Bruges took their religious responsibilities very seriously.   Several created 'beguinages', enclaves of small homes for poor women with a chapel in which the suitably grateful inhabitants could pray for the souls of their benefactors.  I've never encountered anything quite like that before.  These little courtyards are utterly charming.

Some wealthy merchants even went so far as to build private churches.  Two are available to see to this day.  One is a stunning recreation of a church that one might find in Rome, complete with lots of marble (not a locally available stone).  It was built by an Italian merchant who moved to Bruges for the cloth trade and made his fortune there.  The other, known as the Jerusalem chapel, was built by the Adornes family in the 15th century after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem by the patron and his son.  It is still in the family's hands.

I was also lucky to be able to take a tour of Flanders' Fields and visit the City of Ypres.  More than half a million men died in Flanders during World War I.   There are 50 cemeteries and war memorials, large and small, mostly for English and Commonwealth soldiers.  Seeing the slightly undulating terrain and realizing how much water management it takes to make this land farmable, I suddenly understood why the trenches were such hell.  The bombardments blew up all the dikes and the land turned into a sea of mud in which one was supposed to dig a trench!  Unimaginable.  And then it rained all during the battle of Passchendaele.  

Tyne Cot Cemetery and Flanders Fields

We visited Tyne Cot cemetery with a view over a sea of grave stones out to the countryside. It is a beautiful place and as many grave stones as there are, there are even more names of soldiers whose bodies were never found on the wall around it.  We also visited the field dressing station where John McCrae, who wrote the poem "In Flanders' Fields", served as a doctor until he was killed. Next to it is a small field cemetery, where battle casualties were buried almost where they fell.

John McCrae's Field Station

In Flanders's fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard among the guns below.

Virtually everything was destroyed in this area during the war.  Farms disappeared and many of the farmers moved to France, at least for the duration.  Whole towns were wiped off the face of the earth, so most communities in this region have no architecture predating 1920, but Ypres was rebuilt as it had been, right down to its gothic cathedral.  The town has a difficult name to pronounce in French (Ypres) and it isn't much better in Walloon (Ieper), so the British soldiers started calling it Wipers until it just wasn't there any more.  

Ypres

Ypres is particularly pretty and has a wonderful Flanders' Field Museum.  After the war, the British built the Church of St. George for the men and their families who stayed on to deal with the grisly business of identifying and burying the dead. When you step inside, you feel exactly as if you are back in England, right down to the chair cushions embroidered with regimental insignia.

Interior, Church of St. George

On rue Jean Louis Courier

That's pretty much the end of the trip except for some time in Paris.  I've written about that city so much that I'll say no more about this visit.  But it was great fun, especially having tea in the newly refurbished Lutetia Hotel, one of the grand old dames on the Left Bank.

Amsterdam and Delft

Amsterdam is the last port of call on the cruise.  What a fascinating city and what a tribute to the ingenuity and perseverance of the Dutch.  There are not many major cities lower than sea level though it appears that climate change will create a good many more, starting with New Orleans and Norfolk, VA.  No one has done more than the Dutch to take this head on and they have been a consistent leader in water engineering, even from the earliest times when Dutch engineers helped drain the fens in Cambridgeshire, England.

The heyday of Amsterdam and the Low Countries was in the 17th century.  The Dutch East India Company was formed in 1590 and a hundred years later it had 50,000 employees and an army of 10,000 which it deployed around the world, mostly in Southeast Asia.  Amsterdam had one of the first stock exchanges, founded in 1609, and one of the first financial bubbles, the Tulip mania and crash in 1636-37.   It's wealth was spent on objects and recorded by artists in portraits that still attract us today.  Indeed, one historian has said that the Renaissance in Holland was the second best example, after Italy, of conspicuous consumption until our own times.  We think of The Netherlands as open-minded today, but it also took in Jews and Huguenots fleeing Catholic suppression in the 16th century.  In the 18th century, of course, England became dominant, but Amersterdam still boasts the world's largest flower market.

Worker painting Delft porcelain

Holland is known for its beautiful porcelain and I opted for the shore excursion to Delft, which was also the home of Vermeer and his many children.  Visiting the Delft factory was fascinating.  It was being able to import kaolin from China that made possible the beautiful white color of the porcelain.  The color that is still hand-painted on the bisque after its first firing is actually black, but it turns into that beautiful blue as it reacts to the heat of the second firing.

Building Decoration, Delft

Traditional Delft
Front Doors

Delft Street Scene

The city of Delft is quite charming.  As everywhere in Holland and even in southern Belgium, there are canals (and bicycles) in abundance.  The buildings in Delft are just lovely, most built in the 17th century, but here they have a very special tradition of painting their front doors in a very dark green, almost black color and rubbing it to a very high shine.  The house numbers are painted in white script as is the name of the original owner.   In the middle ages, the people who lived here bathed once or twice a year, but they polished their brass door nobs every day -- and still do.  One only hopes they bathe more often nowadays!

The Kiel Canal and Hamburg

Entrance to the Kiel Canal from the Baltic

I haven't got much good to say about Kiel, I'm afraid.  It is a town of maybe a quarter million and was so heavily bombed during World War II that there is virtually nothing left of its former glory.  It is, however, strategically placed at the foot of the Jutland peninsula and so is the starting point on the Baltic side for the great Kiel Canal that creates a short-cut from the Baltic to the North Sea. Unfortunately, we were delayed by high winds from entering the canal at the planned time and so we passed through the whole thing at night.  Bummer!  Nevertheless, the path of our transit was interesting because the Canal ends just as the Elbe River enters the North Sea and we had to make a left turn and sail upriver to get to Hamburg, a city I just fell in love with and would happily visit again.

Founded by Charlemagne in 808 and given the status of "Imperial Free City" by the King Frederick who is mostly known as Barbarossa because of his red hair, Hamburg was one of the major cities of the Hanseatic League, which was a "free trade" area organized not by countries or city states, but my major trading houses in the 13th century.  The League stretched all through the Baltic from Novgorod in Russia to Hamburg and Amsterdam and then on to London.  By banding together, the merchants could cooperate in clearing the Baltic of pirates and make better use of the goods in which each area specialized -- furs from Russia, wood from Norway, wool from England and so on -- all enriching the merchant houses through whose hands the trade goods passed.  But the age of exploration put an end to the League's dominance as countries like Holland, England, Portugal and Spain gained access to the far richer resources of Asia and the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Hamburg has been shaped by the water that surrounds and runs through it.  The continent's second largest port rests along the shores of two lakes, the Inner and Outer Alster, and is divided by three rivers (the Elbe, Alster and Bille) and a series of canals.  More than 2300 bridges link Hamburg's various districts -- more than Amsterdam and Venice combined.  Because of its superb location, Hamburg remained a major trading power as the Hanseatic League collapsed.  The canal, although it suffered major damage during World War II, was not bombed by the allies because they were going to need it once they liberated Holland and western Germany.  And so Hamburg survived to rise again.

Church of St. Michael

Altar, Church of St. Michael

The beautiful Church of St. Michael and several other historic buildings, such as the gorgeous city hall (a real rival of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris), survived World War II with only minor damage.

Hamburg City Hall

The one area that was heavily bombed but rebuilt in its original form after the War is the Speicherstadt Quarter, a series of canals lined with high brick warehouses, now a World

Warehouse
Speicherstadt Quarter, Hamburg

Heritage site.  It takes you right back to the days of sailing ships and cargo hoisted to the warehouse floor right out of the hold by cranes mounted from an overhanging beam at the roof peak.

View over Alster Lake

The rest of the city is full of arresting modern architecture, including the new Opera House which is built atop a warehouse on the river's edge.  The center of the city is on an accessible scale with the beautiful Alster Lakes within easy reach of downtown.  The neighborhood around Alster Lake remains one of elegant homes and the road around it is a kind of millionaire's row.  Like Amsterdam, there's also a renowned red light district, Reeperbahn Street.

Street Scene with St. Michael's Church Spire

One of the things you'll notice from the photo of the view over Alster Lake is the number of church spires.  I've seen the same thing everywhere we've been in Northern Europe.  These places either never had or have long since repurposed gothic cathedrals and the result is a forest of church spires that express their own reaching to God.  What's especially nice is the way the spires stand over otherwise ordinary street scapes, making them feel exceptional (see photo at right).

Alpine Village, Miniature Wonderland

St. Peter's Square, Miniature Wonderland

Venice, Miniature Wonderland

A strange but fascinating attraction is the Miniature Wonderland.  It is privately built and operated as far as I could make out by a bunch of toy train fanatics who have re-created cities and whole landscapes (e.g. the Swiss Alps) on two levels in one of the old warehouses.  As I'm a lover of toy trains too, I was enthralled by the creativity of this group of train buffs. Truly, this goes beyond anything you've ever seen.  It looked to me like the many passenger and freight trains are on the HO scale and so is everything else.  Buses and trucks speed along roads and stop at traffic lights.
There's an operational airport with planes that take off.  There's Venice with its canals, St. Peter's Square, Las Vegas with its hotels on the strip, and of course Hamburg itself.  I've really never seen anything like it!

Copenhagen, Aalborg, Fredericia and More

The Little Mermaid, Copenhagen

Opera House, Copehagen

Lloyd and I had a wonderful visit to Copen-hagen a long time ago.  The city is a jewel, with its busy old port, wonderful shopping and the Tivoli Gardens.  But this time, I took a walking tour starting at the Little Mermaid and then along the waterfront, where several old sailing ships were busy plying their tourist trade, past the Gefion Fountain to the Amalienborg Palace, the winter residence of the Queen. Across the inlet from the palace stands the beautiful Opera House (not Sydney, but stunning nonetheless).

Windmill and Military Baracks in Copenhagen's
Citadel

But in many ways, the most interesting part of the tour was the walk through the citadel, which I had not visited before.  Built in the early 17th century following the design of Louis XIV's famous military engineer, Vauban, it is shaped like a 5-pointed star.  Back then, it could hold just about all of the residents of the area in case of attack.  Although Denmark was a formidable military power for many years, the Swedes were equally so.  Thus, the threat of armed conflict was always present. The two countries fought 22 wars until they wore each other out.   The citadel is still in use as a military barracks and continues to guard Copenhagen's harbor.  The buildings inside, including the last windmill in the city, represent everything I love about Scandinavian architecture -- so simple, yet so elegant.

Entering Aaborg

Jens Bang's House

Aalborg Church

Rough seas prevented our scheduled visit to Skagen, which is on the northern tip of Denmark, so we called at the city of Aalborg further down the coast.  This city of 250,000 was founded in the late 900s by the Vikings in a gorgeous setting on the Limfjord.  It is renowned for aquavit as well as for its Renaissance architecture, particularly Jens Bang's house, built in 1624.  It comes with a funny story because Jens, a prosperous merchant, was not invited to join the City Council.  So, right across from City Hall, he built a magnificent home, caricatures of the faces of the men who had turned him down adorning the pediments of the building.  Aalborg was a monastic center in the middle ages and has a number of beautiful churches.  The church in the town center is simple with a white interior, like all Lutheran houses of worship, and I learned that the sailing ship that hangs in the church nave is common throughout this country of seafarers

Fortifications, Fredericia

Danish Soldier, Fredericia

Old Quarter, Fredericia 

Our next port of call, Fredericia, is a much smaller garrison town (25,000 population) built further south on the Jutland peninsula.  Its earthen battlements unfortunately failed to repel the Swedes, with whom Denmark was constantly at war, until finally, in 1849, the Swedes were successfully outmaneuvered by the Danes.  A statue of an ordinary soldier that celebrates the victory depicts him eerily garbed like a Confederate Soldier during the Civil War, right down to the rifle he carries. But my favorite part of this town was the old quarter where brightly painted tiny cottages lean against each other down narrow streets.  It is here also that I visited one of the most beautiful graveyards I've ever seen.  Each family plot was a small garden unto itself, surrounded by a low hedge and full of flowering shrubs and flowers.  It's said the the Danes love to garden and this cemetery is a real testament to their skill.

Painting of Koldinghus in its Prime

Koldinghus Today

My last excursions in Denmark were to Royal Koldinghus and Christiansfeld, a Moravian village.  Koldinghus was a great castle that was nearly destroyed by fire.  Impossible to rebuild, it remained a ruin for a very long time.  Finally, someone came up with the clever idea of covering the ruins with a roof/shed resting on specially designed columns, closing in the walls where needed to make the building tight against the weather, and then installing various exhibition spaces where possible.  So, today, no longer whitewashed, and with the clever architecture that salvaged the structure in evidence for all to see, it is well worth visiting. We were especially lucky
because it currently houses an exhibit of royal jewelry in honor of the 700th year of the ruling house of Denmark, including these two gorgeous tiaras.

Christiansfeld

Christiansfel Meeting House

Christiansfeld is a Moravian community of long standing.  In this land of simple elegance, it is probably the most unadorned.  The buildings are all clad in a brownish brick.  The church looks like a Quaker meeting house, but the simple chandeliers are gorgeous.  The people here live the strict life demanded by their religion.  The single/widowed women living together in the Sister House and the unmarried men doing the same in their own dwelling.

I've enjoyed this visit to Denmark.  I'd have liked to spend more time in Copenhagen, which is one of my favorite cities, but I've also been exposed to communities large and small that I otherwise never would have visited.

Oslo

Oslo Waterfront

Oslo seems a lot like Gothenburg.  It is a small capital of a small country (at least in terms of population).  Even more than Sweden, Norway's population is increasingly concentrated in its capital.  What I took away from this all-too-short visit is the affection of Norwegians for being out-of-doors in any weather.  Where else would you find a statue of the king on cross-country skis accompanied by his little dog?

The city lies at the end of a large fjord and pleasure boats cram its waterfront.  There is a large ski jump in a park on a hill above the city center (a legacy of hosting the Olympics) and it is used all year long -- for zip lining or in-line skating in the summer and for ski jumping in the winter.  Forests surround the city, so it is only a short drive to cross-country ski and snow-shoe trails, which are also great for hiking in better weather.

When oil was discovered in the North Sea in 1969, the Norwegians went from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to one of the richest.  But they've managed their oil wealth very intelligently, investing in education, health care and infrastructure.  Their egalitarian approach to living in society means they wear their new-found comfort lightly.  Most of the Americans on the tours I've taken gasped when told that people pay taxes of 30, 40 or 50% and are entirely satisfied with the bargain they've made with their government for services in return.  It seems incredible to Americans that this hefty blend of capitalism and social consciousness actually works.

Oslo's Old Fortress

Oslo Opera House

Needless to say, while the old is cherished, the new is embraced.  Oslo's old defensive walls are still in evidence on the waterfront, but Oslo also boasts an opera house on the water.  This one, however, has a roof that looks like a ski jump itself and is used for outdoor seating when concerts are given on a barge anchored in the bay in the summer.

The Norwegians are as environmentally aware as their Scandinavian cousins.  Blessed with abundant hydro power, they've tackled the automotive part of energy consumption and estimate that 40% of the cars on their roads are electric.  There were certainly Teslas everywhere I looked.

Vigeland Park
Mother and Child

Vigeland Park
Crying Baby

Vigeland Park
Youngsters at Play

What is most unusual about Oslo is Vigeland Park, created by a Norwegian sculptor, Gustav Vigeland, who died in 1943 virtually unknown outside his own country.  The park is filled with a series of statues that describe the cycle of life and Vigeland turns his eyes away from none of it.  From a tiny fetus to a dying old man, all the ages and stages of life are represented.  Toping it all is a huge column of bodies that seem to be tumbling from the sky.  I found the whole thing very moving, in part because the sculptures, some in bronze and some in granite, are so vivid, but also because of the setting and their placement in the park.

Vigeland Park
Grandfather with child

Stockholm and Gothenburg, Sweden

The blogs for my trip to Scandinavia are going to reach you all bunched together and late besides because the internet capacity of the ship just wasn't up to managing large chunks of data like photographs and now that I'm on land, it's not so great either.  My computer is definitely going to need a tune-up when I get home!  So, with apologies for the long delay and lack of pacing, here goes...

Judy Ostrow and I met in Stockholm on Sunday, September 23rd for our tour with Viking.  Our "orientation" by bus, which left me utterly confused and directionless, included a tour of Stockholm's magnificent city hall where the ceremonies are held for all of the Nobel prizes except the Peace Prize.  It is a beautiful brick building on the promontory of one of Stockholm's many islands.  I never managed to get a good shot of the exterior, with its high brick walls and beautiful tower, but the interior is a fascinating series of large rooms, one with a very high ceiling and windows set immediately under the roof so that the effect in the northern light is of a giant piazza even though it is all indoors.   The City Council Chambers are in the building (looks like there are a lot of council members judging by the number of seats) as well as a beautiful room covered in gold mosaics.  The centerpiece is a statue representing Stockholm as the center of the world, with emblems of the West (for example, the Eiffel Tower and the American flag) on one side and of the East (e.g. an elephant) on the other.  I enjoyed seeing this amazing building very much.

The Eastern World, Stockholm City Hall

The Western World, Stockholm City Hall

Stockholm is really a jewel of a city with a robust public transit network (subway, bus and tram as well as trains to the suburbs) and bike lanes galore.  The food and shopping are superb.

Old Town, Stockholm

The Old Town (Gamla Stan) is particularly interesting, with the royal palace, the cathedral and lots of wonderful narrow streets full of shops selling beautiful craft work.

Royal Swedish Crown

The palace is not the official residence of the Queen and her family, but rather the "office" where business is conducted, quarterly meetings are held with her government ministers, and foreign dignitaries are received.  There has been a royal residence on this spot for a very long time.  At first it was a fortress that gradually changed into a renaissance palace.  But eventually the influence of the French resulted in the construction of an entirely "modern" building in the 18th century, complete with a slightly smaller version of Versailles' Hall of Mirrors.  The Treasury is small and mostly contains the crowns of the various kings and queens.  I particularly admired a small beauty, shown here, that was created in the 18th century for a fashion-conscious queen.  It is interesting to note that the Swedish monarchs have not worn crowns, even at their coronations, since 1907.

But the best part of my Stockholm adventure was happening to visit the palace on the day the new Parliament was seated following the September 9th election.  The parties here are closely divided, as they are in the U.S., so there is still no prime minister.  Nevertheless, the new government had to be seated on schedule.  Just as I left the palace, I noticed people drifting toward a space further along the side of the building and went over to see what was up.  The soldiers lined up in dress blue uniforms carrying instruments suggested something important was happening and, sure enough, as the band struck up what must have been the national anthem, the Queen and her consort emerged from the building, looking like a prosperous bourgeois couple, followed by their three offspring and their spouses.  They walked to another pavilion and probably went back to the royal residence in the suburbs for lunch.  We are so accustomed (and addicted) to the kind of pomp and circumstance that the British put on so lavishly, that it is almost mind-bending to think of royals who behave like your next door neighbors.  But the Swedes have a very egalitarian view of how society should function and adore this unassuming couple.

Homage to Seaman's Wife, Gothenburg

Gothenburg, our second stop in Sweden, has been quite a different experience.  It feels a lot like Seattle in 1970 (minus the Boeing bust).  With a population of about half a million, it has a kind small town quality that is very endearing.  It is closer to both Denmark and Norway than Stockholm and also has a robust fishing industry and seaport.  Indeed, except for their size, these two cities are almost mirror images of each other in terms of the roles they play in the Swedish economy.  Stockholm is the east-facing city and Gothenburg the west-facing one.  The Gota River, which enters the North Sea here, provides an extraordinary harbor.

Ship Model, Skansen Kronan
Gothenburg

There are two hills in Gothenburg and on one of them sits the Skansen Kronan, a beautiful church built in a simple Lutheran style.  There's a wonderful ship model hanging from the ceiling, a beautiful triptych above the altar that is done in the style of Scandinavian folk art, and the rest consists of bare white walls rising to a wooden ceiling that looks like the inverted hull of a Viking ship.  We were told that it is common practice among these Viking descendants to hang a ship model in the nave of a church.

Gothenburg, Sweden

The modern city sports fashionable avenues and new apartment buildings, parks and fountains.  Altogether a lovely experience.

I've learned a lot more about the Vikings during these few days in Scandinavia.  First of all, there were no horns on their helmets (the creation of a Wagnerian production designer, I would bet).  Second, they were settlers as much as raiders.  Third, their reach, artistic creativity, engineering and craftsmanship were extraordinary.  No barbarians, these.  Viking is thought to mean something like 'coming out of the fjords', which indeed they did, perhaps because the difficult terrain could not support a growing population.  The first ventures were coastal raids to acquire silver, mostly from monasteries, indicating that they were deeply involved in trade in the Middle Ages.  As an indication of their reach, the monastery on the island of Ione off the coast of Western Scotland was raided more than a few times.  The raids also produced slaves who could be sold on the continent and in Constantinople.  It was the Vikings who settled the Hebrides Islands and much of northern Ireland and Scotland.  And it was a King with a Viking heritage, Harold, who was defeated at the Battle of Hastings by William, his cousin from Normandy with his own Viking heritage.  Norman is a shortening of Norsemen.  Eventually, the Kings of Scotland and Sweden/Norway signed a treaty making the Hebrides the territory of Scotland.  And Sweden and Norway separated and made peace with Denmark.  In short, they sorted themselves out in the end.