Visiting Hanzestaden Along the IJssel

In keeping with our Rivers of Europe theme, it was time for our fifth river, the IJssel.  This is one of the oddest rivers we have ever encountered, starting with its name.  In Dutch, the letter combination ij is considered a single letter, so that ijs, "ice," becomes IJs Paleis, "Ice Palace," when you have to capitalize it.

 

The history of the IJssel is far stranger than its spelling.  The Romans noticed that the river came close to the Rhine, but without connecting to it.  Engineers that the Romans were, they dug out a connection to allow their ships to journey further north.  By the 19th century the Dutch got to work with dikes, weirs, dams and other devices to refine the flow, so that today the IJssel takes roughly 1/6th of the waters of the Rhine and sends them northward while the rest heads west.  In 2012 a new system was completed to give even better control.  When the Rhine is flowing hard, more of it can be diverted north to keep Rotterdam from turning into Europe's version of New Orleans.

 

The other end of the IJssel has, if possible, an even odder history.  The river flowed into Flevo Lake until the massive St. Lucia Flood of 1287 (she personally had nothing to do with it -- it simply occurred on her feast day, Dec. 14). The lake's outlet to the North Sea was so widened and deepened that the lake became a large saltwater branch of the North Sea that the Dutch called the Zuiderzee, or "South Sea."

Many floods later, the Dutch decided to reclose the opening with a massive dam, the Afluitsdijk, that was completed in 1932.  Once again, the IJssel flowed into a lake, now called the IJsselmeer.  As it has gone from salty to fresh, it has become Europe's largest lake.

We biked across the IJsselmeer on a second dike, but we'll save that tale for the next blog.  Today we'll take you down the river itself past the densest collection of historic towns in the Netherlands, thanks to that 650-year period in which oceangoing ships could travel through the Zuiderzee and up the IJssel.  Seven cities along the IJssel joined the Hanseatic League and grew rich through trade in the 14th & 15th centuries.  We visited the five largest of them.

We started by biking across the river near Arnhem, where 4 separate bridges stand, cheek by jowl, to carry trains, motor vehicles and bikes.  On the far shore was the next part of our route, a road on top of the river dike.  These are quite common in Holland and often, as here, allow car traffic, which is never bothersome as so few cars use it.

After a bit our route turned left and over a veerooster.  It means cattle grill, so-called because it looks like what meat used to be grilled on over an open fire.  In fact, you almost always see sheep, not cattle, being contained by rooster, and today was no different.  What you also don't see on dikes is lawn mowers, other than this four-legged version.

Our first Hanzestad, or Hanseatic city, was Doesburg.  It was the smallest, perhaps because it was the furthest from the sea, but it nonetheless has what is reputed to be the oldest Waag in the Netherlands.  A Waag is a weigh house, where a government official would weigh cheese or other goods, which buyers and sellers could then know was reliable.  Like many Waags, it has become a quaint and cosy restaurant.

Our overnight was in Bronckhost, Holland's smallest city.  It got city rights in the 1200s, but unlike most other cities, it just never grew.  Sometimes it just happens that way.  Today it has 171 inhabitants.  We picked up a walking map and took a stroll down the Main Street and were out in farm country in 4 minutes. It was a wonderful walk, however, past an old windmill and a typical house-barn combination.  Back in town we noticed activity just under the thatch roof of a house.  A dozen nests clung to the walls, each with one or two baby swallows waiting to be fed.  Every now and then mom or dad would show up and do a five-second hand-off, or rather beak-off, of food.

Our next Hanzestad was Zutphen, where we looked through the old city gate at a building that now houses a wine shop.  We walked through then looked back at the fancier front of the building and the impressive tower on the city gate.  Nearby was St. Walburga's church, begun almost 1,000 years ago and often remodeled into a grander and grander version of itself.  Damaged in WWII, it was not fully restored until 1998.  A very ancient wall painting told the story of the three princes and the three dead people.  When they meet in the woods, the deceased tell the living "What you are, we were.  What we are, you will be."

The bronze map to the left shows what Zutphen looked like back in the day, when it literally had to defend itself from attack.  During the Eighty Years War, when Holland broke free from Spanish control, it was conquered and reconquered several times, with unfortunate consequences for the defenders each of those times.  Our next Hanseatic city, Deventer, shows the ancient outline of its defenses even today in the shape of its canals.  Its Waag displays Deventer's wealth and grandeur for all the world to see.  Our lodging was in the Hotel Fidder, which was once a convent.  Deventer was a charming city and we had a very pleasant time walking down its many atmospheric streets, past many interesting doorways.  Like all good Dutch cities, it also had lots and lots of bikes everywhere.

 

Next was the city of Zwolle, another charmer.  It had a church with a tower we could climb for a few euros.  234 steps later, here's the view.    In one direction is the Museum de Fundatie, with a newly-installed egg on its roof.  In another direction was a typical line of buildings with interesting profiles and some decidedly less charming postwar buildings behind.  Then there's the magnificent Sassenpoort, a 15th century city gate, seen from above and from street level.  Also at street level was a charming organ grinder entertaining the crowds and making a few euros during the Saturday Market.

Before our final city, we headed through the countryside to Giethoorn past several clusters of what appear to be a type of heron.  In a few places there were even platforms that had successfully attracted birds to nest.

Giethoorn is a small place that has attracted the attention of Chinese tourists like almost no other spot in Holland -- about 1/4 million per year!  It is one of a handful of villages that lived for eons entirely by water.  No roads, only canals and footpaths, plus nowadays some 180 footbridges.  Need to move your cow to a new pasture?  Put some hay in your boat and row her over.  Nowadays the thing to do is to rent a boat and to cruise the intricate canal system.  One narrow one-way section is jammed pretty much all day.  We found a hotel right on the waterway that rents electric boats and canoes, and paddled 6-7 miles the afternoon we arrived and again the next morning before biking on to our next destination.  We had no competition for the canoes, but the so-called whisper boats were all rented out within an hour of opening time.  As you can see from the photos, it was charming.  And why all the Chinese, you ask?  Our best guess is that they can't believe there's a place that can resist change so well, and want to see it before it gets paved over.
 

The boating was not entirely in the village.  We were able to get out far from town, though never very far from other boats.  In fact, well out from town, there was even a floating ice cream shop!

 

150 km by water from the Rhine, 200 by bike with our detours, and we were at our last Hanseatic city, Kampen.  We spent two nights here since rain was predicted, accurately as it turns out.  But by late afternoon on our "rain day" the sun was out again and we wandered this charming city, perhaps the best of the five we visited.  Here are a few streets and alleys as a warm-up:

Then there are the three city gates.  The first one, by the river, is the oldest.  The other two were built in 1465, then both were moved and rebuilt in 1615 when the city expanded inland and the city walls had to move as well.

The old city hall is another charmer.  Then there's that tower with a cow on a pole.  Seems a farmer saw some moss up there, thought it was grass, and figured out a way to hoist his cow up to eat it.  Up went the cow and the cow stuck out its tongue.  The farmer thought it meant she liked her meal.  In fact, it meant he had successfully choked his cow to death, and Kampen was the butt of jokes for decades after.

As with so many of our hotels in the Netherlands, the owners provided indoor storage for bikes.  You can see how many folks travel by bike here from the company our tandem had in the bike room!

From our room overlooking the river, we said goodbye to the IJssel.  We'll pick up the narrative in the next posting as we head across a province that wasn't here when we were born -- it's land reclaimed from the Zuiderzee.

 

Adventures in Den Bosch and Arnhem

In our last blog entry we took you with us by bike from Maastricht in the bottom right-hand corner of Holland to 's Hertogenbosch, aka Den Bosch, the capital of North Brabant Province, and on to Arnhem, capital of Gelderland.  Today we will take a closer look at three interesting adventures we had in these last two cities.

 

Den Bosch's canals are unlike others in the Netherlands, due to quirks of history.  Many of them go underneath not just bridges, but also whole buildings and a few whole blocks.  As late as the 1960s they also acted, unfortunately, as open sewers.  When that problem was finally addressed, there was a move to simply fill them in.  Preservationists succeeded in saving part of the complex system, and we got into town early enough to make the last boat trip of the day through this strange world.

It starts simply enough in a quiet, electric motor-driven boat, going under various arches and bridges.  We passed former outlets for waste that were deliberately left to show what it used to be like, but without the aromas.  Pretty soon we were going through longer and longer tunnels, and occasionally we could look forwards or backwards to see what we were passing under.

We were far from done.  The tunnels got longer and narrower.  We're gonna fit through that!!  Then make that tight turn?

So, what's it like to have tourists float through your basement everyday?  We didn't see any residents to pose that question to.

If the name "Den Bosch" has a vaguely familiar sound to you, it's probably because of its most famous son, the painter Jheronimus Aken (Jerome from Aachen (actually his father's birthplace)), who as an adult called himself Hieronymus Bosch after his own birthplace.  His work was appreciated and collected during his lifetime, particularly by the Spaniards who ruled what is now Holland and Belgium, and the closest Bosch painting is now in Rotterdam, 100 km away from the city of Den Bosch.  That hasn't stopped the Jheronimus Bosch Center.  The folks here have made exact copies of each of his works, often a precise copy of the original frame as well, and set them imaginatively in a former church.  You start by going by elevator to the top of the steeple for a look at the Den Bosch of today.  As you can see, we weren't missing any outdoor fun on this wet and windy day.  We then worked our way down the belfry and around the church, admiring these realistic reproductions.

 

Like virtually all artists of the Late Middle Ages -- Bosch died in 1516, one year before Luther's famous 95 Theses -- he dealt almost entirely with religious topics.  Almost every artist of that age painted the Adoration of the Wise Men, often multiple times.  But who put such interesting peasants on the edges, peering in?

In one of a handful of non religious paintings, Bosch shows us a fellow intently trying to follow a shell game at a fair.  We've focused not on the shell game but instead on the left side of the painting, where another fellow is nonchalantly picking the pocket of the onlooker!

 What makes Bosch so fascinating is his wild imagination.  Sometimes it is fairly benign, an obvious role model for Dr. Seuss.  But in many of his religious works, he gets kinda sorta carried away depicting the fate of those who've been naughty.  In The Last Judgment, a triptych painted probably as an altarpiece, Bosch shows us heaven on the left, the Last Judgment in the center, and hell on the right.  The devil is in the details, you might say, such as this little vignette of one person being roasted on a spit, and another being pan-roasted into jelly.  Whew, we all better be good little boys and girls if that is the alternative!

Then there's the passage at death through a long tunnel toward a great light.  We had no idea that this obligatory part of all descriptions nowadays of near-death experiences was already a standard iconographic image 500 years ago.

Before leaving Den Bosch we dropped in on two more sights, each half a block from our hotel.  First was the cathedral, yet another church that has  dazzled and perhaps intimidated many of its visitors over the centuries.  On the outside, however, there was a light touch.  In the most recent renovation a few years ago, workmen installed an angel using a most 21st century way of communicating -- a cellphone. A sign tells you how you can communicate as well with the angel.  Our Dutch is pretty much nonexistent, but we can read enough to tell you that it will cost you 90 euro cents per minute, and that's if you call on a mobile from Holland.  We have no idea whether the angel will impart any heavenly wisdom in return.

 

The other scenic wonder was underneath the street in front of our hotel -- an enormous bicycle parking lot, complete with an air pump and other tools and an electric charging station off-camera to the right.   To get in or out, there's even a not-too-steep staircase with a grooved slot for your bike tires.  Pretty cool!

Our main reason for visiting Arnhem was to go to the Nederlands Openlucht Museum, or as it's called in English, the Open Air Museum of Holland.  It was terrific.

Like most museums if this sort, it was chock full of old farmhouses.  With the help of docents, you got a good feel for the old cottage industries of spinning, weaving and the like.  The details were fascinating, like this high chair that doubled as a potty chair.  Maybe the ancestors of the folks who started In & Out Burgers owned one.  One thing that didn't go in and out for us was the soup we were served at one house where the docent had been making it all morning.  She only had a few bowls, and the two of us and a Dutch family of four just happened to be in the Right Spot at the proverbial Right Time.

 

Another feature of many old houses were the bed boxes.  Until the late 19th century, many Dutch and other Europeans believed it was unhealthy to sleep horizontally.  Beds were more like built-in cabinets, about four feet long from bent neck to curled toe and narrow enough that with two occupants-- the usual minimum occupancy -- there was no chance anyone was going to roll over in bed.  Since there were rarely more than two bed boxes per dwelling and we know that families were way bigger than today, the kids' bed boxes must've looked a lot like a new litter of kittens, year in and year out.

It wasn't all buildings.  The Dutch love gardens, and there were several in the complex, including these two.

It also didn't just wallow in the antiquarian.  One example is this old farmhouse and barn.  When the high speed train line from Amsterdam to Brussels and Paris was being built, it had to go.  It's been preserved as it was in the 1960s and '70s, when the old cow stall area had been converted into a sleek, modern living space.  In the Green Cross Centre building they showed how this Roman Catholic health center provided the poor with a place for a weekly bath, as well as medical attention for babies.  The mannequins were so realistic in this building we had to pause for a moment and make sure they were not docents who were really into role-playing.

Of course there were windmills -- this is Holland, right?  When you see a small mill with a large vane at the back to keep it turned into the wind, its function was almost certainly the moving of water from a wet low spot into a higher drainage canal, the way in which the Netherlands has been able to keep so much land below sea level dry enough for farming.  The larger mill behind it was for milling grain into flour.  In the second photo there is a very large windmill on the left that kept dry a very large polder, or area of reclaimed land.  It could move an amount of water equal to a modern tanker truck every minute.  Then there's another small "meadow mill" and finally a sawmill, which explains why it is open at two ends underneath.  In the center is a dad showing his kids how a self-propelled "ferry" works, by just pulling on the continuous-loop rope.

The first or last exhibit is this group of what were actually slum dwellings from the now-trendy Jordaan District of Amsterdam.  They look attractive on the outside, but the museum conservators have kept one part of the inside as a slum apartment and another as a sleazy tobacco-stained bar.

Our stay in Arnhem has been extended to four nights as we have hunkered down through several more days of rain and high winds.  The only chance we've had to enjoy the view from the roof deck was on the day we arrived.  At least it's given us a chance to bring the blog up to date and do some trip planning for the next few days.  Tomorrow is supposed to be dry in the morning, then one more half-day of rain.  Wish us well making it to our next destination without having to pull out the rain gear!