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| 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.
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| Bruges City Hall |
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| 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.
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| Basilica at Bruges |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Interior, Church of St. George |
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| 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.
