Cold and Wet in the City of Vermeer

Today I went to Delft, the city where Johannes Vermeer--one of the most famous artists of the Dutch "Golden Age"--lived, painted, and died.  During the seventeenth century, Delft was well known for its blue and white china, known as "Delftware."  There's a restaurant not far from where I go to school in Leiden where you can eat delicious Dutch pancakes (similar to crepes) on large Delftware plates painted with villages and landscapes.

When I left this morning to catch the train to Delft, it was an overcast day--nothing out of the ordinary.  The canal on the way to the train station borders a little wood where snowdrops have started to bloom.  As I neared the train station, it started to drizzle--still nothing unusual.  As I rode the train it started to rain.  Then it rained harder.

The misty sky and wet bark of the trees gives a nice ambiance to this picture of the leaning tower of Delft's Oude Kerk, or "Old Church," but it was an acrobatic routine trying to take a photograph without dropping my umbrella in the canal!

I would look around at old stone and brick buildings, sometimes decorated with gilded coats of arms ... and then step in yet another muddy puddle of rain water.

I decided to go inside some churches and museums to wait and see if the rain would stop.  It never did.  The water dripping off my umbrella inside the Oude Kerk made the church feel even more cold.  I could see my breath, my hands practically went numb, and I started to grumble to myself that if they were going to charge admission to go into a church, they could at least install a few heaters.  It was a beautiful building, though, albeit fairly empty, thanks to those ruthless iconoclasts!

Vermeer is buried in the church, and it was amazing to see his grave--admirers of his small, brilliantly painted canvases have continued to leave flowers at his grave well over three hundred years after his death.  It was like an art historians' pilgrimage site!

The Oude Kerk has been damaged and restored many times, but part of it is still medieval, complete with intricately carved buttresses tinged green with moss.

The crowned lions all over Delft remind you of the city's royal heritage.  William the Silent, prince of Orange, led the Protestant opposition to the rule of the Catholic King Philip II of Spain in the second half of the sixteenth century.

During those tense years of strife between Spain and the Low Countries, William sometimes stayed in Delft at the old cloister of St. Agatha, known today as the Prinsenhof.

Like most monasteries in Holland, St. Agatha's was eventually dismantled, but the Prinsenhof Museum still recalls the old days with a few beautiful religious works of art like this carved Deposition from the Cross.  In profound grief, Mary (lower left) collapses in the arms of John the Beloved, mimicking the position of her Son, whose body also "collapses" as he is lowered from the cross.

Philip II called for William's death, and an assassin, disguised as a French Protestant fleeing to William for religious protection, shot and killed the prince of Orange on this stair case.

The bullet holes are still visible in the wall.

Not far from the Oude Kerk and the Prinsenhof is the main market place, and like nearly all Dutch cities, the town hall occupies one end of the space and the main church sits at the the other end.  This is Delft's town hall.  For the Saturday market, vendors had set up tents in between the two buildings.

The tower of the Nieuwe Kerk, or "New Church," soars high above the market, and every half hour the bells ring.  When I frist arrived in Delft, bells from somewhere were playing "Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match" from Fiddler on the Roof, which created kind of an odd disjunction.  Construction on the Nieuwe Kerk began in the fourteenth century after a beggar and another Delft resident had a vision in which heavenly light poured down on the spot where the church stands today.  The legend says that the vision occurred again each year until a portion of the church was completed.

William the Silent, depicted in this stained glass window, was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk since his ancestral burial church was under Spanish control at the time of his assassination.  Necessity started a tradition, and since then nearly all the Dutch royalty from the House of Orange have been interred in the crypt of the Nieuwe Kerk.

William is the only Dutch prince with a mausoleum on the ground level of the church.  The other royal tombs are out of sight, beneath the floor.  The current Dutch monarch is Queen Beatrix, and she, along with her mother and grandmother, are very beloved.

Leiden's Botanical Gardens

Leiden's Botanical Gardens are just across the canal from the University library.  As I was eating lunch on the other side, I could see clumps of snowdrops growing along the water's edge, and so I decided to walk over and take a look.  I was happy to find out that the "museum card" I bought two weeks ago to get free admission to about 300 museums in the Netherlands applies to the Botanical Gardens, too!

The Dutch have been sea-faring traders for centuries, and in 1590, these Botanical Gardens displayed rare flowers and trees brought back from their voyages.  The first tulips in the Netherlands bloomed here--back then one bulb from Turkey cost several years' salary!  Understandably, in Dutch seventeenth-century still lifes, tulips are frequently a symbol for the vanity and worldly glory that will one day fade like a cut flower ...

These yellow ground flowers were blooming in the grass and among the dead branches from last year's shrubs.

Purple crocus--the first flowers of the year.  Sometimes they bloom in the snow.

Snowdrops growing near the canal.  There were several different kinds of ducks swimming and ducking under the water.

There is a small  Japanese garden dedicated to Mr. van Siebold, who spent many years living in Japan, studying its culture, and collecting plant species to take back to Holland during the nineteenth century.  At that time, the Dutch traders were among the only people allowed into Japan.  The government had an unbelievably strict isolationist policy, enforced to a certain degree by the stormy Sea of Japan that protects the islands.  For some reason, the shogun made a special exception for the Dutch.

There are quite a few plants in the gardens that van Siebold himself carried back from Japan nearly two hundred years ago.  Most of them are trees, but I also saw "mountain wisteria" vines.  They are all marked with plaques written in Japanese.

This is van Siebold's Japanese garden.

And ... completely unrelated to the Botanical Gardens, here is my grocery shopping from a few days ago!  Europe has such fabulous chocolate--I particularly like the butter cookies with dark chocolate on top.  In fact I nearly always have a box of them in my backpack.  Only two and a half Euros for this grocery store trip!

The Flower Market in Amsterdam

On Saturday the weather was cool and gray with a little bit of rain--a perfect museum day.  So I went to Amsterdam to visit the Rijksmuseum and the Hermitage.  The famous Hermitage museum in Russia has so many works of art that it can afford to set up "outposts" in cities like Amsterdam and send a new traveling exhibition every few months.  On the way to the Hermitage, I walked by the bloemen markt, the outdoor flower market along the Singel canal.

Even though spring is just starting to come to the Netherlands, the flower market already had an amazing array of cut flowers and potted bulbs like these blue and white hyacinths.

Flowers are pretty inexpensive in Holland where there are acres and acres of tulip fields to pick them from.  The bloemen markt is geared towards tourists, with wooden shoes and ceramic windmills for sale alongside the bulbs, but fifty tulips for 8.50 euros still seems like a pretty amazing deal to me!

 Daffodils are some of the earliest bulbs to bloom in the spring.

There were amaryllis bulbs, and ...

All sorts of other unusual bulbs.

Close by the flower market there is a nineteenth-century Jesuit church dedicated to St. Francis Xavier, the great missionary to Japan and India who died en route to China.  Mass was starting in half and hour, and so the church was open, and I got to look around a little bit.  It is one of the most fabulous Neo-Gothic church interiors I've ever seen.  In the nineteenth and early twentieth century there was a revival of interest not only in Gothic art and architecture but also in the "medieval craftsman."  Rejecting the increasing reliance on machines and factory production in the Industrial Revolution, Neo-Gothic artists tried to be "medieval" by painstakingly doing their work by hand--even hand painting wallpaper designs.  In this tradition, the walls of St. Francis Xavier's are all hand painted to look like tapestries, and the church is filled with colorful statues in elaborate Gothic niches.  In a way, I think it helps you imagine what a Gothic sanctuary might have looked like before the centuries weathered everything into gray, chipped stone.

The Hermitage is in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam.  During the seventeenth century, the Netherlands was extremely tolerant of most religions, and so many Jews sought refuge in Holland.  Rembrandt lived in this Jewish part of town, and he used many Jews as models for his paintings of Christ--very unusual for the time.  The Jewish population was tragically and dramatically decimated after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.  The odd dedication of this Catholic church to Moses and Aaron recalls the heavy Jewish presence once in this area.

The Rijksmuseum is in the southern part of the city.  It was pretty dramatic to watch it slowly take shape out of the mist as I walked toward it.

There was a long line in the rain to get in, but it's worth it to see Vermeer and Rembrandt's work in person!

Corrie ten Boom and the "Hiding Place"

Those of you who have read The Hiding Place will be familiar with the courageous and inspirational story of Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsy who, together with their father, were actively involved in the underground movement to save Dutch Jews from the Nazis.  Although it was extremely dangerous to work against the Nazis during the German occupation of Holland, the ten Boom family offered shelter to hundreds of Jews in their home in Haarlem.  They lived just a stone's throw from St. Bavo's church, and they were devout Christians.  A mission organization gives wonderful free tours of their house with its secret "hiding place" for Jews, and I was deeply moved to hear the story of their lives in the very home they lived in.  It felt like a sacred space, particularly since four members of the ten Boom family gave their lives for this work.  This picture is from a neighborhood bordering the St. Elizabeth Almshouse in Haarlem, not far from the ten Boom house.

This is the ten Boom's living room, located above the watch shop where Corrie and her father made and repaired clocks.  Corrie and Betsy were in their forties when WWII began.  Their father and grandfather had been great admirers of the Jewish faith, and the family eagerly provided temporary refuge to many Jews.  They lived too close to the police station to keep their visitors permanently safe.  In the evenings, they would play the piano, sing, and have prayers together as Christians and Jews.

The "hiding place" was to be used for emergencies only.  It was a narrow space carefully constructed behind a false wall in Corrie's bedroom.  It could only hold about six people, and most of them would have to stand, or take turns sitting.  In this picture part of the brick wall has been removed to give a better view of the space, but originally the "hiding place" was only accessible through a secret door in the linen closet.

The back of the bottom shelf could be lifted up, and people could crawl in.  Then the door would be closed, folded linen placed in front of it, and the police would not suspect anything unusual.  The ten Booms even arranged for one of the people hiding to sit with their back against the linen cupboard so that if the police knocked on it, it wouldn't sound hollow.  One day, the ten Booms were betrayed.  The Gestapo showed up, and Betsy sounded the alarm.  Several Jews and two young men working for the underground resistance scrambled into the "hiding place" in seventy seconds.  The police searched the house in vain, but they arrested Corrie, Betsy, and her father.  They were held in prison in Holland for several days.  The police tried to make Corrie and Betsy's elderly father promise not to hide Jews anymore: "You're an old man," they said.  "It's better that you die at home in bed."  He responded, "If you let me go, tomorrow I will open my door again to assist the Jews."  They beat and tortured him, and he died within a few days.  Betsy and Corrie were sent to a concentration camp.

This is a picture of the space inside the "hiding place"--it was difficult to get a good photo because the room is so small.  Meanwhile, the Nazis had left guards in the ten Boom house, but the underground resistance devised a plan to smuggle out the hidden Jews.  They communicated with Dutch police officers who were secretly opposed to the Nazis, and one night the ten Boom house was entirely staffed by these Dutch police.  The occupants of the "hiding place"--who had been without water for some time--were then able to get out.  Betsy did not survive the concentration camp, but not long after her death, Corrie was released due to an administration error.  It was January, and as she rode a train back to the Netherlands, she remembered her sister's prophetic words that they both would be free in the new year.  Their brother also died as a result of afflictions from the war.  Corrie lived to be 91 years old, dying in California in 1983.  She spent the rest of her life traveling, speaking, and working with people who had been psychologically damaged by the war, including former Nazis.  Her message was the family motto, something that Betsy had encouraged her to always share: "Christ is victor."  In Israel there is a special garden planted with trees to honor the "righteous" men and women who valiantly worked to save the Jews during the Holocaust.  Three trees in that grove bear the names of Corrie, Betsy, and their father.

The Bishopric of Utrecht

The large city of Utrecht lies inland from the North Sea coast and wielded significant influence on theology, politics, and art in the Low Countries.  The Cathedral of St. Martin was the center for the diocese of Utrecht, and in the sixteenth century the city's powerful bishop was elevated to the status of archbishop.  Also in the sixteenth century, the Netherlands converted to Protestantism, but Utrecht remained an important headquarters for Dutch Catholics.  Today churches and museums dot the downtown area.

In front of the church of St. John stands a statue of St. Willibrord, the courageous, seventh-century bishop of the city who undertook a dangerous mission to convert the pagan tribes in Friesland (northern Holland) to Christianity.  A flower market was taking place outside St. John's, and when I went inside I was a little shocked to find a huge book sale going on that filled the entire building.  I'm not sure if it is used as a church anymore, but there were essentially no religious objects or furniture anymore.

According to my map it was a little bit of a walk from the train station to the old cathedral downtown.  First, though, I had to make my way through a mall with hundreds of shops attached to the station.  Then there was a maze of streets with more shops, and when I finally got out, there was the cathedral with its massive bell tower right in front of me!  The "long walk" on my map had been completely colonized by retail!

Jan van Nassau, an important historical figure for the city, stands guard outside a university building on the cathedral square.

The wind was racing through a gateway in the cathedral bell tower so ferociously that it was almost impossible to take a picture without making the image blurry.  I went into this fifteenth-century cloister to take refuge.  The frieze over the door depicts St. Martin of Tours dividing his cloak to give half of it to a beggar.  According to legend, St. Martin was a righteous soldier, and after his encounter with the beggar he had a dream in which Christ appeared, wearing the torn cloak the saint had recently parted with.  The beggar had been Christ in disguise: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

The cloister was quiet and beautiful with more of the legend of St. Martin carved above each window.

Hundreds of years of rain and snow have weathered the gargoyles so that they look like corpses of monsters in in various states of decay!

Sadly, most of the cathedral was destroyed in a terrible hurricane in 1674.  "Hurricanes in Holland," you ask?  I wouldn't have believed it either, but after experiencing the near-cyclone-like weather conditions in Utrecht, I'm not surprised that the wind was the culprit here!  At least the transept of the church did not fall down.

In the case of this painted and gilded carving, however, the wind was not the culprit.  The smashed faces of these saints are the work of Calvinist iconoclasts who bashed apart an enormous amount of sacred art in Holland and Belgium.  This particular example comes from a chapel inside the cathedral--and, almost appropriately, the "cathedral" is actually no longer a real cathedral.  It is kind of an ecumenical space shared by a variety of denominations.

Every Saturday, for instance, the "cathedral" has public concerts, free of charge.  I was really happy to be there on a Saturday, especially when I saw that the performance for the day was Rossini's "La Petite Messe," or "The Little Mass."  It started at 3:30 pm, and so I decided to go look at a couple churches and a museum, drop in for the "Little Mass," and then have enough time afterwards to visit another museum briefly before  closing time at 5:00 pm.  Well, the "Little Mass" turned out not to be so little.  It was, in fact, extremely long.  I sat on a very hard folding chair made of wood between two elderly Dutch women for an hour and a half and started to go cross-eyed from looking at this organ for so long.

Needless to say, I didn't get to go to another museum.  I did have a wonderful visit at the Catharijnconvent, a marvelous museum of medieval art located next door to the new cathedral--the functioning cathedral for the archdiocese of  Utrecht.  This is a courtyard in the museum.

The Catharijnconvent has a wonderful collection of wooden and stone sculpture, ecclesiastical vestments, and precious church treasure.  This is a close up of a seventeenth-century monstrance made from gold and decorated with diamonds.  The consecrated Host, or bread of the Sacrament, would be enclosed in the circular window and then the monstrance would be placed on the altar or carried in procession for adoration.

One of their most famous pieces is a painted statue of St. Ursula from the sixteenth century.  This is a view of the righteous companions and clergymen who followed her to martyrdom depicted as miniature figures gathered around her feet.

I went to a service in the new cathedral in the evening.  It was dark when it was over, and I started back for the train station.  The train I needed to catch only came every half hour, and, uncharacteristically, I had given myself more than enough time to get to the station--usually I find myself madly running to get to platforms just seconds before the doors close.  As I walked along, though, I started to realize that if I ran a little I might be able to catch an earlier train.  So ironically I again ended up running, even though I had plenty of time.  Just as I flew down the stairs to the platform, though, the train left.  I was really annoyed that now I would have to sit on the platform for half an hour with the cold wind hurdling down the tracks when I could have spent more time in the cathedral listening to the organ postlude.  I waited and waited, and finally thirty minutes passed, and it was time for my train to arrive.  When there were four minutes to go, the signs switched for the next departure, and I was shocked to see that it was not my train!  I looked all around for a conductor to figure out what had happened, but I couldn't find one.  I re-checked the schedules and suddenly realized I was on the wrong platform!  I dashed to the right platform with only two minutes to go, and ... just as I arrived, the train left!  It was like a comic routine!  Only it was not funny.  It was not at all funny.  I sat back down--this time on a new platform--in the cold wind, and half an hour later I was finally on the right train and on my way home!