The old heart of Ghent, towers reaching to the sky, a mediaeval Manhattan. On a sunny winter evening they light up like they were made of bronze. On a grey winter morning, they are grim. At the west end is St Niklaaskerk. A stark, grey monolith reaching straight up. Everything about it is vertical. It doesn't take up space on the ground but it stretches into the sky. Tall and thin. Threatening.
I can't shake Dan Carlin's Prophets of Doom, a tale of crazy religious fanaticism that played out across the Low Countries. Right here, in this place, in this square.
Standing here on a cold morning and I am right there. Right in the sixteenth century. It is easy to picture the crowds baying for blood. The dark robed clergymen holding the power of life and death. Merchants for whom stability equalled profit.
I don't know if this is fallout from the horrible walk from the station, my mean mood from the shitty hotel or just the fact that history surrounds you and towers above you.
These were buildings to send a message. St Niklaas to show the wealth of the merchants. The Belfort to remind you of the power of the state. St Baaf's just so you know who holds the real power: the Church.
Outside was austere and conservative, befitting respectable Flemish merchants. Inside was beautiful. Stark, but beautiful. The light was stunning, the grey day replaced with colour. It soared up into the heavens. It's height emphasises how narrow it is. The Flemish merchants, like mediaeval Donald Trumps, built up rather than out. Land costs, the state taxes every square foot and stone is cheaper than gold. Always thinking about margins, they built up, not out.
The interior is plain, just white and grey. None of the adornment of those degenerate Byzantine or Roman spendthrifts. Spend money and the next thing you know people are having orgies. A fresco is the gateway drug to high living and debauchery.
The colour comes from the central tower. A glass spike reaching upwards, light pouring in through red and blue and yellow panes. It is striking. Despite the beauty, you can't get away from the scale. The doors alone are taller than some of the nearby buildings. Everything in it is meant to dwarf you and the weird perspectives just stretch everything out further.
The patron saint of seafaring and commerce, the Dutch and Flemish loved St Nick. He is everywhere in the Low Countries. Ever with an eye on profit, they even managed to commoditise him, creating the greatest franchise in modern history. He transformed from a Turkish bishop with a liking for the whores to Sint Niklaas to Sinter Klaas to, finally, Santa Claus. If only those merchant guilds had copyrighted him.
But there are other saints here. The statues I misremembered in Bruges. Ghost white, holding the mechanism of their own deaths. St Simon the Zealot carries a massive saw (guess what happened to him), St Bartholemew is holding a vicious looking butcher knife, someone else carries an ax. They look like the waiting room of a hospital on a holiday weekend. Each one has that same look of resignation on his face, the same look every worn-down husband has when he puts the hedge cutter through the electric cable by accident. "Yeah, I know, I fucked up. You think I don't get enough shit off St Peter without being made to stand here for eternity with this saw as well?".
I think churches like these are hilarious. It used to freak me out that the Catholic church glorified torture so much. Now, particularly with all the shifty foot shuffling they've done over the last couple of decades, it just amuses me. If I built a hall, filled it with pictures of a bunch of guys in loincloths playing out S&M scenes there's no way anybody in their right mind is coming to my Sunday School. But them?
"I don't know how it happened. One minute the priest is talking about Saint Sebastian tied naked to a tree, next minute..."
OK, it's not funny in retrospect but seriously, how did anybody think things wouldn't turn out the way they did?
The city bell tower has some seriously grotesque history attached to it. The Belfort was also Ghent's chokey. If you were a bit naughty, you got banged up here. Example, Cymeon who was sentenced to be starved to death inside. He survived by being breastfed by his daughter on her daily visit. Yep, breastfed. And he got immortalised in stone on the side of the Belfort in a piece of art titled "Mammelokker". The Tit Sucker.
You can ride an elevator to the top of the Belfort for a mere 8 euros. If you want to break it down into real terms then that is a good couple of beers. And the local beers are good. I didn't bother, not enough reward for the sacrifice of two beers.
Fuck the Mona Lisa. This is the greatest Renaissance painting on the planet.
The first time I came to Ghent was for the sole purpose of seeing the Mystic Lamb, the incredible altarpiece done by the Van Eyck brothers in the 1400's. I managed to fuck that up completely and by the time I got there, it was shut.
Six years later and I am finally there.
It's in a crypt in St Baaf's cathedral. Down narrow stairs. Through a huge set of doors. Inside, in the dark, in what must have been an old tomb. A giant glass cube, glowing with white light, like the monolith from 2001. It is stunning. At the time that the Byzantines were still churning out the same tired old frescoes they had done for six centuries, Jan Van Eyck was producing this. I don't think it has ever been bettered in the six centuries that followed.
I don't even know how to describe it. Just the technical skill alone is stunning, it looks like it has been done in Photoshop. But it hasn't, it was done six hundred years ago with brushes and one of the first uses of oil paints. The subject, I can't even begin to describe it. It's a biblical allegory but that's as far as I can get with it. The Mystic Lamb is just that. Mystic. It's more of an hallucination than a Bible tale. What it means? Good luck, I don't know. I've read explanations, I get it but I just shrug and think "it is what it is". Moving. Beautiful. It makes me feel happy just to look at it.
I won't do it justice. Maya Angelou said you forget everything else except how something makes you feel. You need to see the Ghent Altarpiece yourself and feel how it makes you feel.
The history is fascinating, too. There are theories Hubert Van Eyck never actually worked on it, or that he never even existed. One of the panels, the Just Judges, was stolen in 1934 and never recovered, leading to all sorts of theories on who stole it and why. It's been linked to the totally mental world of Rennes-le-Chateau. The current panel is a copy. Or maybe not, it may be the original, according to some. Even the Nazis had a go at stealing it.
Andrew Graham-Dixon's High Art of the Low Countries and Waldemar Januszczak's The Renaissance Unchained have great explanations of its history and meaning.
I came across this story on the excellent Executed Today website. That's David van der Leyen and Levina Ghyselins in the picture back there. They were Anabaptists, a psycho apocalyptic Christian cult that thrived in northern Europe in the 1500's. If you want to know what life was like in a violent religious state then look no further than Germany and the Low Countries. A bunch of people got sick of Catholicism, set up their own brand of Protestantism, got hijacked by some utter crazies and then the whole thing went off the rails after they took over the city of Muenster.
They were never liked but at least at the start of the 1500's an Anabaptist could expect to be executed in a fairly reasonable way. Hangings, maybe a beheading. But as time went by, they checked out through ever more bizarre means. In Bruges they were fond of burying them alive. In Antwerp, a maritime city, sew them into sacks and let the river dispose of them. Jan van Leyden, leader of the Muenster rebellion, had his dick chopped off and nailed to the city gates.
It reached it's pinnacle of badly done executions in Ghent with David and Levina. First they were strangled. Which in the 1500's meant not enough to kill you, just enough to scare the absolute shit out of you. From the looks of the tools lying around, the executioners had a bit of a warm up act, too. Then they were tied to stakes, a bag of gunpowder hung round each of their necks and set on fire. Blowing holes in their chests didn't kill them. Being burnt alive didn't kill them. Even being stabbed three times with a pitchfork didn't kill them. Finally, their necks were broken. I'm pretty sure it is all going on in front of the Belfort. It was known as an execution spot and that looks like either St Baaf's or St Nick's in the background.
When you read the lists of the sheer number of heretics alone executed, not counting petty criminals, murderers, thieves and Spaniards, there must have been something going on every day. I try to imagine in places like Ghent what it was like just going about your day. As Dan Carlin himself says, walk a mile in their moccasins. A public execution was normal. And they were popular, people didn't shy away from them. You think entertainment is crap now? Want to go see the executions, darling? I hear Johann is being burnt this afternoon. With a bit of luck he might shit himself, it's so funny when that happens, the children love it...
People wander around and trams fly past. Everyone acts like there is not a giant castle looming over them. The Gravensteen, the hulking great fortress in the heart of Ghent, is the most incongruous castle I have ever visited. It is just there. You turn a corner and there is a mediaeval castle right in front of you. Nobody seems to notice.
There is another unexpected sight, a couple of memorial plaques just inside the entrance. The Gravensteen was home, for a while, of the Belgian SAS regiment. During World War II, the British trained and equipped Belgian paratroopers who were incorporated into the British Army as the 5th SAS Regiment.
One of their most prolific members was Eddy Blondeel. A former athlete and a total savage when it came to fighting Germans. He campaigned tirelessly for the British to deploy Belgian commandoes into the field. The 5th SAS Regiment, and Eddy Blondeel, were the first Belgian paratroopers to land in their home country. Amongst their achievements was the capture of notorious war-criminal, Ribbentrop.
I loved the Gravensteen. I had milled around outside with my morbid fear of buying a fucking ticket for anything and actually parting with some money. On a recent trip I realised that I have zero souvenirs of anywhere because I am too stingy to spend money on them. But I finally manned up, took the pain and handed over 10 euros.
I am glad I did. The castle is great. It's a real higgledy piggledy mess. This is where a fairytale villain would stay. It's the same grim, grey stone that everything else is made from. It looks mean. Squat and muscular, a stone pitbull. If you were outside, you were not getting in and you probably wouldn't want to anyway.
You think your life is shit? Downtrodden by the patriarchy or the New World Order?
Poor you.
On the bright side, you don't live in a time when men with long poles and spring loaded, spike-lined collars on the end used those devices to catch you by the neck and deposit you in some sewage filled dungeon to have your appendages chopped off an inch at a time before you were burnt in front of your friends and neighbours.
You want to check your privilege now?
There's something cold and stark about the old butchers' hall. It hints at death. The gable looks like a skull and the corbelled windows stare out like dead cow eyes. It would have been a grim place and there is still a grim atmosphere to it today. Even the plastic hams dangling from the rafters like a serial killer's Christmas decorations can't bring any comedy to it.
I love places like these because they make me see what my life would have been like in the middle ages. You can dream all you like about being a knight or a count, chances are you were a peasant. Schlepping stinking carcasses around all day for a few coins that wouldn't buy you a tub of lard.
The stalls outside were the tripe sellers, too shitty even to be allowed inside the main hall. Today, one of them is Filip's frituur, a guy selling fantastic golden fries covered in salt and mayo. There is a great little pub, 't Galgenhuis, built on the end of the hall, too.
Charles V is a son of Ghent. They named the local beer after him. No Kardashian ever had a beer named after her, regardless of her arse. You need to do epic stuff for that.
And Charles did epic stuff. Look at the Stadhuis, it's covered in noble savages, religious symbols and navigation instruments. Sounds like he was running an early version of the Sea Shepherd, mapping the world and spreading civilisation. In reality, he was wiping out the most impressive cultures the New World had seen and stealing everything they owned. Gold and silver, the land under their feet. Cortez and Pizarro were sanctioned by Charles. The most conservative historian is going to struggle to find any positives with the conquest of the Americas.
He even fucked his home town when they stepped out of line. When Ghent objected to its taxes being wasted on foreign wars, Charles stormed in and stamped on them. The city walls were flattened. The original St Baaf's was demolished and turned into a fortress. A new cathedral was built like a Catholic Death Star, just to show who held the power here, you protestant pigs. The city lost all its legal and trading privileges and the guilds were nationalised. Weapons were banned and even the Belfry clock was taken down to teach them a lesson. In a world where no-one owned a watch, that's a pretty shitty thing to do.
Twenty-five of the city's leaders were executed and 300 more were forced to wear nooses round their necks, walk to Charles's palace in their drawers and beg him not to hang them. All in response to a protest where not one single shot was fired and everyone surrendered as soon as the army turned up.
Epic, maybe. A bit of a scumbag? More than likely. As Bernal Diaz said, we brought them religion and civilization in exchange for killing them and stealing their gold. Not the best deal.
It must have been a hell of a search trying to find something to put in Big Cannon Square. But the great and the good of Ghent, bless their hearts, they went for the obvious option of putting a big cannon in it. And painted it red. I'm pretty sure that's not the original colour but it's a bold move. Either that, or it is to make sure you don't walk into it.
The City Pavilion is a piece of grand civic architecture. Except the locals call it the sheep-pen. Which is not a bad name for it. The burghers of Ghent want you to believe it is some monumental statement on the modernity of a city with a rich historical past. Or some bullshit like that.
It feels more like its nickname. It feels agricultural, like a market place for livestock. It looks very modern yet it feels old. The angles are all wrong in it. The proportions of the space it encloses are wrong, too. Its a space that doesn't exist in modern architecture, it plays a mind trick on you and takes you back to mediaeval times without going all theme-park Gothic.
The sheep-pen is nice at night when the hundreds of little windows catch the light against the dark sky. It's ugly to look at but it creates a space that makes you feel something. I liked it.
There is a lot of stuff that I cannot be bothered with. I don't mean here, I mean in general. Trying to convince me that graffiti is art is one of those things. I get the whole Banksy, street-art idea. I like that, I like pieces that either make me think or just say "that's nice". My art tastes are pretty simple. A load of shit scrawled over a wall, like the John Lennon wall in Prague has become, is not art. The burghers of Ghent want you to think that a scruffy alleyway in the town centre is an art installation. It isn't, it's just an alleyway that smells of piss.
My other pet hate is gentrification. When a place gets invaded by hipsters, it's over. Just to the north of the meat market is a section of the city that is a hipster haven. Nice little buildings but infested by vegan restaurants and craft beer bars. Part of me dies seeing some smug, twig-armed, hipster fuck pretending that some shitty IPA is the future of Belgian brewing.
It's a real shame as it's an atmospheric neighbourhood. There are some nice old buildings and a beguinage (another victim of Charles V's bad temper) to explore. Instead, I get the feel that the run-down character is carefully curated and the buildings aren't as crumbling as they are made to look.
Ghent's train station is named after St Peter's abbey. It's a big, rambling complex to the south of the city centre, right by the river. It's a real mish-mash of styles, Baroque domes and mediaeval quadrangles. I never went in, I only came across it when I was walking to the station and trying to find a better route than the dismal main road into town.
It has a ton of history and I wish I had more time to explore it. The abbey is now a museum and exhibition space and is undergoing a lot of restoration after wars and iconoclasms took their toll.
The abbey is not far from the Contemporary Arts Museum (SMAK) and the Citadel Park. The park is a nice place to wander. I like city parks, especially in winter. I like the emptiness of them. Faye Dunaway photographs parks in winter in Three Days of the Condor and Robert Redford says the same thing.
The Devil House, round the back of the cathedral, is one of the oldest stone palaces in Ghent. It got its name because of the dark deeds done by its occupier, Gerard the Villain. A nasty piece of mediaeval work, sadly and inexplicably widowed five times.
But you really need to ask yourself how stupid you have to be. He is known for murdering his guests. He lives in the Devil House. And he's called "Gerard the Villain"? What do you expect? There's a pretty good chance that when you go round it's not going to be the quiet night you were expecting. When you get that greased wooden pole shoved up your arse, you can't really expect to use a #metoo and be taken seriously.
You guessed it, the Socialist Workers' building. Yep, this beautiful piece of Art Nouveau indulgence belonged to those poor proles. Nothing changes. Show me a roomful of union leaders and you can bet there's more millionaires in it than a Waitrose car park.
It's on the Vrijdagmarkt square, another execution site. They liked to burn their Anabaptists and Protestants all over the place for some variety.
It's an alignment worthy of prehistoric man. Lined up perfectly on the setting sun. For an hour or so, the old mediaeval quays turn into one of the most beautiful spots on the planet. Bathed in yellow winter light, a load of little bars and restaurants come to life. People stop hustling and bustling. It's time to linger. Sit on some steps. Stop for a beer.
