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more Brugge, Belgium
Like our first stop, Oxford, Brugge was meant to be a soft landing spot on the continent, but we were completely captivated by the city and its life -- that characters out of its history, five centuries dead, would have made such lasting contributions. For example... | ||
 Louis Gruuthuse's imposing house
ceiling of the main Gruuthuse entry |
One especially prosperous member of 15th Century Brugge society, the brewer Louis Gruuthuse, built a house next door to a church he was also restoring, and as part of the deal he and his family got a private balcony that looks right down into the nave of the church. His house was richly made in every way, especially the carving of bosses and ceilings.  |
 private chapel adjoining church next door |  the Gruuthuse Great Entry Hall |
One issue not spoken about but that is implicit in the way houses were built during this period: wives and daughters of wealthy merchants stayed within their homes most of the time ...and so a good deal of thought went into creating good windows for watching, engaging overlooks, and even the opportunity to go to church without being seen. |
 view from the Gruuthuse balcony |
 Brugge's Begijnhof is now inhabited by nuns
Built with the same mastery, but much less ornamentation, I found the Begijnhof easier to appreciate than Louis' great house.
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During Brugge's most prosperous period, many merchants made their wealth by going on expeditions as far afield as Cyprus, leaving their households in Brugge for months and years. To cut down on domestic expenses, they often moved their wives, called "begijn" (a word not far from "widow") into special "begijnhofs" where they lived sobre, contemplative, and certainly chaste lives in what amounted to a cloistered setting ... without the inconvenience of vows.
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We visited the Groeninge Museum, which has a fine small collection of Flemish primitives, the school of painting that just preceded the rennaissance, in which the colors and techniques, including perspective, were just shimmering into existence. Like so much else at the time, Brugge was the center for the art world, and figures in the backgrounds of many paintings. |  Brugge citizen line-up by P. Pourbus |
 old copper wort cooler
There are limitations to working in what is effectively a museum, and seeing these makes me question our american insistence on growth. Every culture but ours seems to impose artificial controls that preserve the scale of their endeavors. In Brugge, these controls don't seem to pinch at all, and they do seem to confer peacefulness. |
Like the boat ride, the visit to the brewery of Straffe Hendrik (Strong Henry) is nearly compulsory. Since it comes with a great place to have lunch -- best salad in a month! -- and ends with a free beer, we couldn't resist. Like Guinness, beer has been brewed here for centuries (actually a couple of centuries longer than Guinness) but only enough for a city, not for a whole race. Their signature beer, a golden brew flavored with coriander, contained 8% alcohol when named, but now it's the more standard 6%. It's delicious, and seldom gets served outside Brugge.   a poster on the brewery wall at Strong Henry |
 the Town Hall facade
I'm more interested in the secret ingredients that allowed Brugge to brew itself such a great surround; these seem to be continuous and loving attention to the human qualities, abiding pride in living in the same place for centuries, patience and willingness to sacrifice in the short term for long term betterment. Then there's tolerance and trust in workmanship unbound by committees and penny-pinching budgets. Brugge is grand precisely because it thought well enough of its citizens to allow them to make it grand. Maybe San Francisco could have done that once, but Santa Rosa? Never! And yet Brugge is just Santa Rosa's size. |
Nothing in my upbringing prepares me to comprehend a time and ethos that would build such magnificently decorated public structures. It's almost an article of faith that we americans living during the later half of the 20th Century were the most enlightened, prosperous, and free ... and yet the buildings we built are, compared to these, utilititarian, boring and ugly. I begin now to comprehend why so many USers seem to have an inferiority complex when it comes to comparing our "culture" to what must have been here.
fanciful towers and a gilded gate |
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On our last evening in Brugge we chose a local's favorite restaurant on the Markt square and enjoyed the play of light and people across the square at sunset. The food was good, the beer and the company superb, and I knew we would want to come back to this city at another time of year. |
One joy of the European dinner is that it's the major event of the evening, and one sits at table until one is ready to go out for a last walk or to bed. We were joined during dessert by Emily, a young woman Chad had met, a bright-eyed lawyer to be who gave us a sense of the abiding humanist spirit of the city she obviously loves. Easy for us to come to love it, too ... but it was time to move on. |
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