Nine Days in Belgium and France - Part 1

Last summer, as I've detailed in a series of blog posts, I joined my son Alex for ten days in Japan. This summer, we decided to tour part of Belgium and Northern France. In planning the trip, I was especially interested in visiting the sites of some of the great battles of World War I, the Great War, where Karen's grandfather (Alex's great grandfather) Frank Wolinski had seen action. I was also hoping to visit Waterloo, site of Napoleon's defeat 200 years ago. And I had a rather nebulous wish to soak up some of the atmosphere of the Middle Ages, as mediated by the ancient churches and cathedrals and the land and air itself. 

Having spent the better part of a day in transit from Central Virginia to Brussels Airport, I was a little anxious about catching the train from the airport to the hotel where I would join Alex. Flemish, however, turns out to be closer to English than I had imagined. A sign that said “Dese trein gang hier,” followed by a list of obvious stops, including the Gare Nord, relieved my worries. If you can speak English, you are going to be OK  with Flemish.

Having met up with Alex, deposited my suitcase at the hotel, and freshened up, it was time to explore. We set off at once for the Grand Place, the center of medieval Brussels.

Beer turns out to be the national language of Brussels’ Grand Place, or Grote Markt. The dense warrens of narrow alleys around it lead down into the lower city or up toward the cathedral, the art school and the royal palace.

 

Grand Place. Photo by Gary Mawyer

Alleys around the Grand Place, lined with shops and cafes. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

Belgian draft is actually ambrosia; the Grand Place includes the 17th century Brewer’s Guild, and very impressive it is. 

Guild of the Brasseurs. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Medieval Town Hall, Grand Square. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

Skyline of the Hotel de Ville, seen over a steamer of moules at the Cafe Roy D'Espagne.                  
Photo by Gary Mawyer.

In addition to foaming glasses of gold, Brussels is the home of pommes frites, which the Belgians plausibly claim to have invented. They are everywhere; and also mussels, really good ones. The dish to track down is moules frites, steamed mussels with French fries. Do not miss a bucket of moules in garlic and cream sauce with a cone of frites and just about anything they have on tap, as you watch the sun go down in Grand Place. While I'm sure Brussels must offer some truly recherché viands in its more elegant venues, we did not search them out. The city seemed built for Brueghel’s feasts, that is to say, the food of the people. 

Alex, meditating moules frites steamed in wine. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530-1569), (Wikipedia.)

A few words about the past of Brussels. As the museum in the Hotel de Ville documents, Brussels began as a fort in a marsh, around which humble dwellings clustered. A regional market quickly established itself on the site of the current Grand Place, and justified a wall around the growing town. Outside each of the town gates, a new village sprang up, justifying a new wall which unfortunately was now too expansive to defend. At this point there was a high town with a castle and an abbey church, and streets of artisans, and the market place and the low town. Lots of generations passed this way, replete with plagues and wars, until the bloody awkwardness known as the Eighty Years’ War tore the Low Countries apart.

The Triumph of Death, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530-1569), (Wikipedia.)

Brussels shook the nightmare of medieval politics off, and reinvented itself in the image of the prosperous middle-class Enlightenment, only to have its mostly defenseless new-model city destroyed again in 1695 by the Duc de Villeroi, as a gesture meant to distract the League of Augsburg from a different Spanish war. The Holy Roman fracture lasted for centuries and helped shape Belgium, culminating in the Belgian War of Independence in 1830-1831, followed not long after by the Belgian Empire, the sudden establishment of vast national and private fortunes, and the onset of modernity. Belgium was then overrun twice in the 20th century in the opening phase of both world wars. This dark and bloody history probably explains the great civility one meets with in Belgium and the resulting sense of peace and quiet as one rambles around Brussels.

The sense of empire is writ large in the royal palace and the streets below it.

Royal Palace. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

Imperial Streets. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

The grace of the Belle Epoch is on show at the currently somewhat dishabille Botanical Gardens; and the sculptures there may be said to reflect the Imperial world view and the Leopoldian state of nature as well.

Botanical Garden, currently awaiting reconstruction. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

Nature. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

Belgian lion, fed up with it all. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

Where did everybody go? Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Brussels is an art capital. It's been an Art Nouveau capital, an Art Deco capital,  and a Surrealist capital. The Surrealist painter René Magritte spent his life in Schaerbeek, a belle epoch suburb of Brussels that today is sometimes called “Little Turkey” in recognition of its bustling and vivacious Turkish émigré population. Schaerbeek is a landscape of amazing vistas which, at present, often center on monumental buildings that are shuttered and overgrown with weeds, like the massive church down the boulevard in this photo taken from the steps of the equally monumental and shuttered up Schaerbeek town hall.

Schaerbeek: Abandoned Church . Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Schaerbeek, home of sour cherry beer, which is a lot better than it sounds, may not have much use for its churches any more, but it is a truly attractive and charming urban space.

Closeup of the massive abandoned church above, but the trolley wires are in vigorous use. 
Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

Schaerbeek town hall square. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Long view of Schaerbeek town hall square. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Desuetude seems to strike at random in Brussels, but the medieval Cathedral of Saint Michael and Saint Gudula has the feeling of a live church, a community space not entirely given up to the tourists.  The church was not given cathedral status until 1962 but dates back to the 11th century. Under it are the foundations of an even earlier chapel. There was another extensive building phase in the 13th century and the church was finally largely completed in 1519. Afterwards quite a lot of baroque decoration was added along with monuments of all eras. Would it be an overstatement to say that any grand church is not really completed until it falls out of use and the period of extraction and ruin begins?

Cathedral of Saint Michael and Saint Gudula. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

Of course, photographs won't really do justice to a cathedral; one has to smell it, a millennium of varnish, wax and incense all worked up into a scent one might call attar of must.

Main aisle. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

One may well ask, “How long, O Lord, is this cathedral?” and the answer is, 109 meters or 358 feet in internal length, but it seems much bigger.

Death well carved. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 

The pulpit in this cathedral is a mighty thing, showing Adam and Eve being ejected from Eden while Death looks on approvingly. It’s an absolute masterpiece, and as Alex remarked, it seems designed to make the sinners in attendance take the sermon pretty seriously.

The Brussels cathedral also has treasures and relics which can be viewed in a side chapel for a nominal sum. We found the treasures really interesting on a number of counts. They included vestments from several different centuries, some of the regalia from the tomb of a Hapsburg governor of the Holy Roman Empire period, precious chalices from a variety of epochs, some fragmentary remains of holy personages such as Saint Elizabeth, John the Baptist, and others, and a surprisingly large piece of the True Cross together with its early 13th century reliquary and a larger reliquary built to enclose the whole, along with a bit of the original Crown of Thorns. 

It would be easy, as Mark Twain did, to speculate on the credulity of the ages presumably lavished on such things. It is also fascinating to wonder what their real provenance might be; the relics are far from recent and definitely came from someone, somewhere, under circumstances that could well be quite remarkable. Some, like the True Cross fragment and its very early reliquary, were looted from Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade and brought back to Brabant, meaning they are very early artifacts that were venerated elsewhere long before reaching Brussels. Objects of faith, at least for some, or at least historically; objects of mystery, definitely.

Brussels is also a world center of chocolate, and chocolate artisans are much in evidence around the Grand Place. This has to be mentioned--the chocolate is no ordinary thing there, it is a mystique, an intoxication. We stayed busy every waking moment but left without seeing the museums, aware of the churches we had missed and the neighborhoods that needed to be walked--Brussels, to us a city of many mysteries, would repay a very long visit.

From Brussels, we rented a car and headed for Ieper, aka Ypres, leaving the more Francophone region of Belgium and entering Flanders proper, to tour one of the most bitter battlefields of the Great War, which will be the subject of my next blog post.