Belgium Part 4 - Castles and Beer in Ghent

One of the strangest developments that has come to American society in recent years is the mainstreaming of fantasy. Whether it's shows like Game of Thrones or zombie sagas or the sudden overexposure of Star Wars or even the popular acceptance of renaissance fairs, fantasy is everywhere.

I think it has come at the expense of reality.

We visited four castles on our trip, three that are tourist sites. Each of them were relics of medieval Europe, when nobility was given responsibility for lands belonging to kings and queens in exchange for military service. Members of the nobility controlled land that included towns, churches, and farms, and they tended to serve as cavalry. Vassals were granted possession of land by the lords and acted as their assistants. The peasants, the class of most people (and most of our European ancestors), were serfs, forced to swear allegiance to the lord and the vassals by taking an oath on the Bible, work the land, and pay taxes and rent in exchange for "military protection." Serfdom was one step above slavery, as they were free to leave the land, but they had no options when they did except to bind themselves to another lord. There were different levels of serfdom, but many did not even own the clothes on their backs - everything was owned by the lord, and those who did have some land couldn't tend to it until they had finished with the lord's land. As all the land belonged to the king, there was nowhere to live except on a lord's land. Punishment for not providing enough produce, tax, or other product to the lord was harsh. Criminals and mentally ill were more often than not put to death. Many serfs were the descendants of Roman slaves. It took centuries to make the transition from slavery to serfdom, perhaps beginning with slave owners allowing their slaves to live in family housing and giving more freedoms not for a commitment to human rights, but for fear of slave revolts.

Life in medieval Europe was not some fantasy. It was hard. We should be mocking it and rejoicing in our progress, not glorifying it.

By the time Ghent came to economic prominence, serfdom was in decline in Western Europe. Gravensteen, the castle we visited in Ghent, dates back to the last days of serfdom. Built in 1180, it was modeled after Crusader castles and was used by the Counts of Flanders until the 14th century, when it was used as a prison and courthouse. Eventually it decayed and was left to rot until the City of Ghent renovated it in the late nineteenth century. I'm glad they did. It's the perfect monument to how bad life was for the common folk in medieval times.

Gravensteen

It's fun to see a castle stuck in the middle of modern life.

Plaza across from Gravensteen

Entrance

 

The only good thing about the wind that day was it allowed for flag photos!

Stairway up. Chris nearly turned around and left. Ha!

No cell service inside the castle walls!

Knight stuff. The guns seemed out of place but I guess the nobles had them. They were quite beautiful, actually, works of art. All the weapons and armor were masterfully engraved.

Top of the castle

You can see the Graslei bank from yesterday's post

Ghent through an arrowslit

A guillotine

While we glorify knights and castles in popular culture, the reality is awful. The worst kinds of torture devices were used in Gravensteen - racks that would stretch a person until his limbs began to rip apart, neck collars that would stab you if you moved your head, devices to cut off your thumbs, waterboarding, brands that burned your "crime" into your forehead - but after awhile it became easier to just chop off heads. It was rather routine at one point. While you recoil in horror at Islamic jihadis chopping off heads, you can't forget that Christians did the same thing for centuries. You live at this time. Your ancestors lived back then. We don't live outside history. We are history. One day the jihadis will be a part of history just as Christian torturers are a part of history. You can't separate the two or say one is worse than the other just because you're living now. They are both the same evil.

In one room, there was a pit where they threw people. Many people died of illness down there, as there was no heat and the air is always damp in Flanders. The "cruel and unusual punishment" clause in our Constitution corrected centuries old practices such as this.

For whatever reason, I didn't take any photos of the torture instruments, perhaps because I was too horrified. Also, there was something irreverent about it. These devices killed people in abominable ways. They say Gravensteen is haunted. I think I felt the spirits of those who suffered because they were born at the wrong time in history.

Courtroom where judge sat

Wall walkway

Some of the same buildings that the lords of the castle and the prison guards saw.

Cellar

I don't want to live in a time when lords ruled castles and the common folk work their butts off just to survive and when they're tortured for minor infractions or debts or affairs or for having a mental illness. I don't want to see that time glorified, either. Let's put the castles and the knights and the dragons behind us. We've changed for the better.

But maybe we haven't changed all that much. Maybe we are living in a time when the rich and privileged control the land and take our homes when we don't pay their rents (mortgages) and pay us peanuts for doing the work to make them wealthier, when we kill unarmed people for selling individual cigarettes and carrying Skittles, when we execute mentally retarded people and children for some warped view of "justice," when we torture in the name of security. Sure, I can take 1000 photos and show them to you by pressing some buttons and we don't die of plagues and small pox anymore, but have we changed very much as humans? Look at what is happening in our presidential campaigns. The attitudes are certainly medieval.

You can assign a different word to the system, call it "capitalism" instead of "feudalism," but people in medieval times didn't call it feudalism - that was Adam Smith in the eighteenth century who put the term into popular use. Words are just words and we can call anything what we like but it doesn't change the essence of it, and while our hands don't bleed and we aren't starving anymore, are we not still providing the labor to the haves who use it to have more?

Too many of us live under the illusion of prosperity when it can all go away with one stroke of bad luck. I'm taking advantage of my present good fortune and going on trips where I can't help but think about these things. Which leads to beer.

We walked a bit more until we weren't sure what else we could do, given that all the tourist sites were closed. This is what we saw:

St. Michael's Church

After walking around a bit, we went for a bite. I went for Belgian beer. We went to a tavern that is as old as the rest of the city, where we met some great people and made some friends and had great conversations and learned a lot about Ghent and Flanders and Europe and had to deal with the usual embarrassing questions about Trump. (It occurs to me right now that Europeans don't meet Trump supporters because that type of xenophobic scum doesn't travel.) It was a good time.

We had to return to Antwerp, which is a short train ride, but I would have liked to spend more time in this gem of a city.

Belgium Part 3 - Time Traveling to Ghent and Adoration of the Mystic Lamb

I had a good post written for this, one that I spent a lot of time on, but it disappeared, and though I've tried to rewrite some of it, it just isn't the same. My disappointment is such that I don't want to write any more posts. But I will. But I won't check for typos here. I won't.

On the third day we went to Ghent. I had never been, though I expected great things. Ghent is a well-preserved medieval city that has recently seen an infusion of restoration funds. Well worth the expense, let me tell you. The main sites were built in the 13^th century before the European Enlightenment and during a time when people of Europe believed in dragons. (But what if there were dragons and they became extinct because knights were always slaying them? They used to have lions in Europe, you know!)

St. Michael's Church

The belfry

I guess they renamed Book Street to Facebook Street. Groan.

Not so old post office.

The Middle Ages were dark times for Western civilization. Europe was wallowing in religious superstition, deadly plagues, and little technological or scientific advancement while the Islamic world was flourishing in mathematics, science, medicine, technology, and literature, that is, until the Mongols destroyed the Middle East, effects we still feel today. The Crusades changed Europe’s fortunes, as soldiers were exposed to new places and new ideas. Blah blah, something about the Crusades destroying feudalism because the feudal lords fought and died, leaving their serfs free to start new lives, and returning soldiers brought back new goods to sell, ushering in a new economic system that we'd come to know as mercantilism, point being the European Enlightenment couldn’t have happened without the Crusades. I'm not going to rewrite this textbook stuff. By the thirteenth century Europe began to emerge from the darkness, and Ghent became one of the most important cities on the continent. The belfry, St. Bavo’s Cathedral, and St. Nicholas Church are some of the buildings that date back to then.
 

The belfry we'd go up

St. Nicholas

The stairway up the belfry...we only had to walk 55 steps to an elevator. I would have done the full staircase if not for Chris!

Gargoyle view

Theater from above

Ghent

View of St. Nicholas

This is how narrow the walkway is

Gravensteen Castle in the distance

The bell room

The bell chimes. We waited until the clock struck 1pm to watch it play.

Clearly not the original clock

Rocks for weights

This dragon used to be at the top. Medieval Europeans believed in dragons.

Theater from below

Belfry from the ground

When you're walking beneath blue skies, camera in hand, dodging trams instead of bullets, it can be hard to believe that these buildings have survived Europe’s multiple suicide attempts (with apologies to Kurt Vonnegut) or that World War II was anything but a subject of Hollywood movies. The chapters of Europe's history books are divided by the war of the time, each more brutal than the one before it, the last nearly destroying it entirely. It didn't, though. There's something to be said for the resilience of human beings, taking themselves to the brink time and time again, only to come back renewed and ready to try again for peace. That's us common folk keeping the species alive. If not for us, the feudal lords of wealth and power would have destroyed themselves long ago. But with each passing generation, it seems a little more humanity is lost, and one has to wonder how much time is left before the last drop tumbles to this fragile little rock we live on and we cease being anything other than flesh and bone and cold steel set securely in our hands.

Juxtaposition of modern tram line and 700 year old castle.

Moreover, Europe has successfully fended off American attempts to export its wasteful mentality, where you tear buildings down so quickly that one generation’s town is not recognizable to the next. I suppose that's a kind of war, too, but I don't think it's better. Europeans adapt. They run tram lines down streets so narrow our American vehicles could not fit. We tear down our buildings and change the names of things and lose our identities in the process. It's a spiritual crisis. I'm not talking about the kind of "spiritual" that religious people think they have. I'm talking about the core of our humanity, the compassion and suffering and all the things that make us human, our essence of being. When psychopaths shoot up movie theaters and schools, when suburban teens are dying from a heroin epidemic, when people are arming themselves for fear of the boogeyman, that's a societal illness. These are all symptoms of a greater disease. We've let them become normal. We're going to die if we leave it untreated.

This has been a bar for 700 years.

Clearly the chairs are not 700 years old. But the person who designed them may have had 700 year old eyes.

 Although our American history is wrought with some of the worst things human beings can do to each other, we also have managed some of the best. The American experience is different for each group that came - willingly or unwillingly (largely unwillingly, yes, white people included) - to participate. Each one of us, whether our ancestors came from Europe, Africa, the Muslim World, Asia, or even Native Americans, whose ancestors also migrated to this land, albeit at a much earlier time, find ourselves experiencing something very different than what the people of the old lands experience. We don't have 13th century buildings or Roman ruins or a thousand year old Hindi temples or dozens of generations that have lived in the same place looking at the same things and developing strong identities. That doesn't mean we have to constantly tear down what we have built. It doesn't mean we have to change the names of things that are a part of our history. It doesn't mean we have to experience neo-feudalism (yes, a bank actually owns your house, and your mortgage is just a form of rent) to find ourselves. We are experiencing an identity crisis. Americans don't know who they are and how can they? They've torn down our childhood memories, those which made us us, and replaced them with something we don't recognize, and when we finally get to know that, they tear it down, too. No wonder everyone's running around afraid of everything. 

Inside St. Nicholas Church...it's been here for 700 years.

Ghent was largely spared during World War II, but it does have a significant place in its history. One of the highlights of the city is the Altarpiece of Ghent in St. Bavos Cathedral that Americans know from the Clooney movie The Monuments Men. It had been taken by the Nazis as so much European art was, but this wasn’t any ordinary piece. This was the painting Hitler wanted above all else because he believed it was the key to him winning WWII. 

If you’ve ever watched the History Channel (or as some of us call it, the Hitler Channel because half of their programming seems to be about him), you know that Hitler was fascinated by the occult. Well, he thought that the altarpiece contained a map that would lead him to the Holy Grail and other treasures of the Arma Cristi, which would give him supernatural powers to take over the world. A lot of Nazi resources were dedicated to tracking down and taking the altarpiece (formally titled "Adoration of the Mystic Lamb"), and a lot of lives were risked in trying to hide it from them.

The altarpiece is undergoing restoration but we were able to see most of it behind air conditioned glass, although several of the panels were located in another place (including the Adam and Eve panels you see in black and white.) One of the appeals is the use of bright colors, which was innovative at the time (most paintings of the Flemish and Dutch masters are so dark and dreary and the people look so unhappy and the children are like miniature adults which just makes them look creepy,) and it was the first painting to use primarily oil-based paints. While it didn’t inspire me to buy paints or go to mass, I found it fascinating because of its history. As one of the most famous and important works in history, it has been stolen a number of times, moved around all over Europe like something out of a Dan Brown story, and in a small way was responsible for World War II itself. After all, the Nazis started out as a fringe occult fraternity before growing into a political movement. That stuff is so weird. So. Weird.

Unfortunately, we could not take photos of the altarpiece or of the cathedral itself, though I did steal a couple. Here is the altarpiece from the internet followed by my stolen photos that are crooked because I couldn't hold the camera to my eye.

And finally, some pics of Graslei part of Ghent. This city was truly a gem.

St. Michael's Church