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Bruges

Cold.


That's all I could think about as I walked from the station. It was snowing and the air was damp. Chilled you to the bone. The kind of damp cold that no amount of clothing can keep out.


It was bleak. Bruges is ringed by an ugly dual carriageway. Like many old cities in Europe, the city walls were demolished to make way for an outer ring road. And every time it just leaves a wasteland boundary of concrete and low maintenance shrubs between the old and new parts of town.


Bruges is the same which is a real shame because it doesn't do justice to the place. It must be a hard decision, you need to provide a city that people can live in but the only way you can do that is destroy parts of what people come to see. There are lots of places I can think of where exactly the same thing has been done and it has the same result: a ring of really ugly development around the old town. The only place I can think of where they did it right was Krakow, where the line of the walls became the Planty, the circular park that surrounds the centre.

My hotel was in Assebroek, a quiet suburb just to the east of the train station. I plodded the 20 minutes from the train station, along the ugly ring road, to get there. The snow was turning to sleet, I was getting wet and everything was coloured by my grim mood. The cold took up all of my mind. I got to the hotel, warm and cosy and friendly. I wanted to sleep, just for a minute or two. But I knew this would turn into an hour or two and the warmth of my bed would make it easy to persuade myself that I had seen Bruges before, it didn't matter if I missed a bit.


I forced myself out, back into the quiet, sleepy suburb. I wandered up its terraced streets, crossed the ring road and entered the old town by the Ghentpoort. The walls may be long gone but the town gates are still there and still the main entrances to the city centre. It is ringed by a canal with a green embankment on the inner side that is pleasant to walk along. Old trees and old moorings. Birds waiting for a sign of a fish. Cobbled streets. Joggers and dog walkers when it is not so cold or wet.

The Execution Wall

A little walled garden in the car park of an insurance company or something's offices. There are a dozen markers lined against one wall, one of them for an Englishman named Fryatt. The wall is pock marked.

This little walled garden was the last thing those twelve men saw. The occupying German army of the First World War executed them, and probably dozens of others, right here. By firing squad. Belgium did not need to fight, they did not even need to resist. Germany wasn't a threat to them. France was the real target and Belgium was just a transit route. All they had to do was sit back, wait for the French to lose.

But they didn't. Or couldn't. Instead they resisted. They fought back and at great cost to themselves. They even sacrificed great tracks of their country to the sea when they opened the gates on the sea dykes. The Belgians knew the cost of their actions. Thousands died.

Belgium is snaked by trenches and battle lines where massive numbers of men were slaughtered. But it is always these little memorials that move me. I think because they are human and very intimate. You get a sense of what it was to find yourself there. The battlefields are just fields now but these small places remind you: this could very easily have been you. You can look at that wall and imagine how it felt to know this was the last thing you would see.

"There are a lot of alcoves in the Konigin Astridpark..."

Just accept it, you have to walk round Bruges doing quotes from In Bruges. There is even a filming locations map available from the tourist info office.

Bruges is not a shithole.

Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf...

And yes, the Konigin Astridpark has many alcoves. The nooks and crannies.


It's actually a nice little park. I know it sounds stupid but it looks exactly like it does in the film. You can see the play park from the bandstand, where Ken watches Ray try to shoot himself. There is a bench right next to the swings where they sit and talk.


Queen Astrid was Belgium's Lady Di. She was loved by the people and died in a car crash. There are memorials to her all over Belgium.

North-east Bruges


Cut off by two canals either side, there is a section of Bruges that sits like an island. Most tourists wedge themselves into a square kilometre in the middle of town but it's this part I have always liked.

Cobbled streets and whitewashed, ancient terraced houses. It's old and empty and bleak in winter.

The Jeruzalemkerk

The Jeruzalemkerk is the strangest building in Bruges. It was built by a wealthy Italian, a son of the Adornes family who had settled in Bruges. In the 1400's, he travelled to Jerusalem. When he returned he decided to recreate the Church of the Holy Sepulchre here in Flanders.


The old wooden door creaks open. Every time I have visited the church I have had it to myself. Inside is dark, paintings blackened by age on the walls. In the middle is a big, black tomb. Adornes is buried in here with his wife and their images are carved on the lid.


It must have been a weird feeling. Seeing yourself being carved, knowing you are going to end up underneath it. On show. When one of you dies then the other one knows, you are going to get stuck in there with him in a few years time. It's easy to say it was a different age but how can you not be bothered by that? How do you feel knowing that your tomb is all ready and waiting there for you with your other half already inside, slowly turning to a skeleton. Do you ever think "I am getting in there soon with him"?


The other thing you can't not notice is the altar. It's a big lump of rock carved into the shape of a hill. It's topped by three crosses that are damn near life-size. Golgotha. There are skulls carved into it, as though abandoned and lying in the mud. Also carved into it are tools.


I didn't get it at first. Why has someone carved pliers and a hammer and a ladder? They look random, like a builder has gone on a tea break. And then you see other things. A flail. A whip. Dice. A sponge on a stick. A spear. These are the Arma Christi, the Weapons of Christ, and Belgium is full of legends about them.


Behind the altar is another chapel. In the floor is a flagstone carved with the Jerusalem cross and hanging on the wall is a painting of the Mandylion of Edessa, another relic that was possibly the origin of the Shroud of Turin. In the back is a tiny, gated doorway. So small you need to crouch. It opens into a cell with a full size statue of a crucified Jesus lying on a slab, eyes wide open.


It's a weird place. It feels like it has been made up. The official story says Adornes returned from the Holy Land and rebuilt what he saw in Jerusalem. But that makes no sense. If the Jeruzalemkerk is what he saw, then he saw the Arma Christi, a collection of relics that even Hitler hunted, he maybe saw the Mandylion of Edessa (or some other shroud artefact) and he saw the tomb of an unresurrected Christ. Or, he built a church full of very weird and hard to explain symbolism. Either way, it's something out the pages of a novel.


The Jeruzalemkerk features in In Bruges. It's used as a stand-in for the Church of the Holy Blood which refused permission to film. The Adornes family obviously have a sense of humour.


I love the Jeruzalemkerk and, if I am honest, was the main reason I came back to Bruges. The rest of the Adornes Domain is worth wandering around, too. The Scottish Lounge has the cheapest cup of coffee in Belgium and a damn fine Madeira sponge cake. Comfy armchairs and a warm fire.

Go through an old, narrow lane. Blinde-Ezelstraat, the street of the blind donkey. You come out in the cobbled Burg Square. The Basilica of the Holy Blood is on your left. It's small and built into a corner. You almost wouldn't notice it. If it wasn't for the crowds of idiots milling around and the gold leaf covering it.


A pokey set of doors leads into the Chapel of St Basil. Inside is plain, romanesque. Columns and simple brick built arches. It's dark, occasional pools of yellow light. Tourists bypass it but this was how the chapel, upstairs, originally looked. I came here when I was a teenager. I'd run away from home, I wanted a big adventure and set off across Europe. Bruges had been my first stop. I think this church had been the only place I'd actually visited and it stuck in my mind.


Nothing had changed. I wandered round it, trying to get my bearings from something I could barely remember. I'd been scared and excited, I remembered that. My whole childhood had been spent waiting for a time I could escape and this had been it. Run. Go.


A fleeting memory would come and then escape just before I could focus on it. Our lives are so short that every year is a huge expanse of time to us. These places are so old that the passing of time is now insignificant.


Basilica of the Holy Blood


I went outside. Melancholic. I climbed the wide staircase past statues of crusader-era nobles. Sibylla of Jerusalem was there, nowhere near as fit as Eva Green made her in Kingdom of Heaven.

I went inside the upper chapel when I was certain there was no entry fee. I am the world's tightest tourist. Nothing had changed in the twenty years or more that had passed since I had come here. Scared I'd run out of money, I stuck to places that were free to visit. As a responsible adult with a sensible job and too many credit cards, I still have that fear. I'd rather look in from outside than buy a ticket.

The chapel is bright and colourful. There's a lot of red, like they were really trying to make the point about the blood. Okay, we get it... Rows of loose chairs, people milling around and a disorganised atmosphere. In an annex is a crystal phial filled with some brown goo that is allegedly the blood of Jesus.

There was a queue of people waiting to kiss it. A bored priest sat behind it, wiping the slobber off before the next pilgrim. Apparently, miraculous relics are 99% ineffective against herpes. If it can't stop you getting a cold sore then your missing leg isn't growing back any time soon. Sorry about that but good luck with it anyway.

Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk

Last time I had been in Bruges I'd been to a church that had a bunch of statues of saints all holding the implements of their execution. One holding a saw, one holding some horrific sharpened farm tool that you know got shoved up his arse just from the look of it. All these dudes had been immortalised for the ridiculously bloodthirsty ways they had been dispatched, spending eternity holding the instruments of their own doom with a look of resignation on their faces that said "yeah, I know, I know where it's going...".
So I paid to get in the Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk. Only it wasn't the right place. The place looked nothing like the place I remembered. It was bright and white and warm. There was beautiful, carved woodwork everywhere. Tiled floors. Giltwork. Not austere at all. No gory statues. I got it wrong and I was now pissed off that I'd paid for a ticket so I did about a dozen laps of the place to get my money's worth.


The best part is the tomb of Charles the Bold and his daughter, Mary of Burgundy. Surprisingly cheery for a mausoleum. Charles was son of Phillip the Good. He was seven years old at the time of his first marriage, his wife was twelve and died after only a couple of years. As Wikipedia points out, and I quote directly, "they had no children". Thanks, Jimmy Wales, for that.

Charles was married three times and each one "died". In Disney, you get all these princesses whose sole purpose in life is to hook up with the handsome yet misunderstood king and live happily ever after. Reality was, most of them would have been thinking "yeah, thanks but fuck that" whenever some chancellor or chamberlain came calling. There was a good chance you were going to end up dead when marrying into nobility. Supposedly lives were short in those days but marrying some psycho royal is a guaranteed trip to a stone box, usually less some major part of your anatomy.

Next to Charles is the tomb of Mary of Burgundy, his daughter. Mary married into the Hapsburg empire. At the time, she was better known as Mary the Rich. And at 25, Mary the Rich was also dead in an "accident", her husband inheriting the lot.

Apparently, the highlight of the church is a Michelangelo statue of the Virgin Mary. Alright, it's nice, it's well done. But I don't get the whole Michelangelo statues thing, it's just people carved out of stone. He does it well, I'll give him that, but I can't get excited. It was the only statue he did ever to leave Italy in his lifetime. That should tell you something, it's not that impressive. You aren't going to let your best stuff go. I don't know but, to me, stuff like this is just stone people. I'm the first to admit I couldn't do it but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

What I did like was the mediaeval graves. It's hard to tell from the interior but Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk is old. It goes back to the 1200's. Underneath the later tiled floor is old stuff. Graves and tombs, especially. Many of them have been opened up and put on display underneath glass panels. And they are lovely. Rock-cut sarcophagi with simple but nice decoration inside. Again, it really makes me think that Bruges is obsessed with death and graves and tombs.

BOSCH

One of the reasons I came back to Bruges was to see the Flemish paintings in the Groeninge Museum. Especially Hieronymous Bosch's The Last Judgement. The horrific, weird vision of the final moments of the end of the world. Full of strange creatures and naked people.

I'll be honest. I was cold, I was tired and I was hungry. I couldn't find the entrance and ended up wandering around the gardens trying to find the way in like an idiot. Eventually, when I did see it, I thought "fuck this" because I was in such a bad mood. I went and had a big tray of chips in a grotty cafe round the corner instead.

Charles II

Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.


Good old Charles the Second, the Merry Monarch. Upon losing the English Civil War to Oliver Cromwell, one of history's great bastards, Charles bravely ran away to Europe. He suffered great hardships, first of all being forced to put up with living in the Louvre in Paris, then on to Cologne and finally settling in Bruges. He took up residence first in the Huis Bouchotte, a small palace in the middle of the Markt Square used for weather forecasting, before decanting to the hovel that is now the five star Casselberg Hotel. It was a hard life.

On the other hand, while he was here Charles founded regiments that became the Life Guards and Grenadier Guards. It wasn't all suffering, he did at least found time for some work.

Next day I had some time to kill before my train to Ghent.
I crossed the outer canal ring at Katelijnpoort. Followed the tree-lined path that led into a park. Today was warmer, damp and grey but not cold. The snow was a memory, vanished in the night apart from the odd roof here and there. 
Minnewater Park, quiet and peaceful on a Sunday morning. Well dressed middle aged ladies on their husbands' arms. People walking small dogs. Straggling, bare trees, black against the blank sky. I like parks, I like the escape from the city. A park on a Sunday morning is a glimpse into the past. What people do here and now, they did a hundred years ago, too. 
I crossed the bridge over the Minnewater pond. Swans drifted up and down, not caring about winter. An avenue of trees, gravel under foot. Spring was close. I was happy.

The Beguijnhof

The Beguines are an old tradition in Flanders. Communities of women who no longer wanted to be part of the temporal world but did not want to join religious orders. There are Begijnhofs, their walled-in towns within a town, all over Belgium and the Netherlands. Right in the centre of Amsterdam is a huge Begijnhof that few tourists ever realise is there. It covers many city blocks right in the shopping district, hidden away behind old tenements and glass store fronts. It's a lovely oasis of calm.

Bruges has its own Begijnhof. Right next to the Minnewater, in the south-west of the old city. It sits behind old, high brick walls. There are only a couple of gates where you can enter. At its centre is a grassy square, like a village green. Round its edges are whitewashed terraces and cottages that look centuries old. On one edge is a brick church, its spire reaching up into the grey sky.

The whole place is quiet. There is no-one around. But eyes are watching you. You can feel them. Feel the gaze as you walk about the place. It feels not quite abandoned, not quite in use.


The Begijnhof reminded me of a New England town. Not a modern town, but the New England of Arthur Miller or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Washington Irving. Old colonies, dark deeds. This was a place that was peaceful and yet slightly scary. Keep the world out there out, keep the world in here in.


I pushed open the doors of the old church. Sunday morning and mass had just finished. Bitter incense in the air, sharp and metallic and smoky. Another stark church, white walls and dark wood. Punctuated here and there with the red of candles, blood red to remind you that the world was still there. Even safe behind your walls, the world is still there. Flagstones carved with names and dates, graves beneath your feet. Yet again, the dead of Bruges are very close.


I passed through another gate. Crossed the Minnewater. A final walk around town, a picture by the horse fountain, buy a souvenir beer glass. Trace my steps back to the station and wait for the train to Ghent. I stand on the platform in the cold sunshine and it is hard to tell which age I am in.