A Clock and a Castle at Muiden

I have a friend in Church who repairs and maintains large clocks.  Every six months or so he goes to the city of Muiden to check on the cogs and wheels of the clock in the old Sint-Nicolaas Church.  A couple months ago he invited me to go with him.  Muiden is located on the southern edge of the Ijsselmeer, an enormous lake.  In fact, it is almost as long as the provinces of Noord- and Zuid-Holland combined.  It used to be part of the North Sea, but the Dutch built a huge dike in 1932 and turned it into a lake.

Muiden is a picturesque town with boats anchored along the tree-lined canal.  The church in the picture is not the one we visited to check up on the clock.  This one is also dedicated to St. Nicholas, but it was built much later by the Catholics after the Protestants took the old Sint-Nicolaas Church and turned it into a Calvinist sanctuary during the Reformation.

Here is the old Sint-Nicolaas Church, located right behind the newer Catholic Church of St. Nicholas.  It has been Protestant for centuries, but you can see medieval wall paintings of saints in a few places where the white plaster has been removed.  The Dutch Calvinists white-washed over most images when they took over a church.

We had to climb up a very steep, very narrow spiral staircase to reach the eighteenth-century system of wheels, chains, and pulleys that operates the clock.   It was unbelievably complicated.

We went up still higher in the tower to see the bronze bells.  They ring on the hour after the clock wheels have ticked off enough seconds to cause a chain reaction with chains and weights that eventually makes a hammer hit the bell.  The system is aided nowadays by modern mechanics. 

And looking closely at the bell, we could see that it dated from the pre-Reformation days of the church.  Affixed to the bell was a bronze image of the church's patron saint, St. Nicholas, with an inscription giving the year the bell was made--1500!  How unbelievable to think that these bells have rung from the church tower for all those centuries!

We finished in the church and walked through the town towards Muiderslot, the city's castle.  It is a medieval building, but it has been greatly refurbished--complete with flags flying from the towers.  I suspect the motivation was probably more to draw tourists than to preserve the castle, but even so it looked to me like they did a very nice job.

Here's the bridge across the mote.  We couldn't go inside because the tourist season hadn't begun yet, but they let us walk around the grounds.

The castle is surrounded by a canal with cattails and trees, and the Ijsselmeer stretches out in the distance.