Going back in time

Going back in time

Do you fancy a walk through Antwerp as it was in its golden 16th century, or the 17th century town of Rubens, Van Dijck, and Plantin?

The Time Machine Project, a cooperation of 70 organizations from 20 European countries is trying to get the necessary funds from the European authorities to complete the project. One of the organizations is the Antwerp University.

The aim of the project is to bring together all historical data stored in universities, libraries and archives over Europe and store them digitally. In a later stage individuals will be able to add their own data. All these data together will drive a kind of time travel machine that allows one to walk through time using VR Glasses or Google glasses or the like.

Of course the Time Machine Project is a very ambitious one, but fortunately there are similar projects it can build upon. One of these is Gistorical Antwerp.

‘Gistorical Antwerp’ looks like the Time Machine Project, but on a much smaller scale,’ says Tim Soens, researcher at the Antwerp University. This project has been running for four years and aims to rebuild the inner city up to 500 years ago. The project is expected to finish in 2020, and by then a 2D map of the town should be available online. When you consult the map you will be able to see what a particular street looked like, what types of goods were sold there, who lived in which house, …

The first results of the Time Machine Project are expected by 2021, that is if Frédéric Kaplan, a Swiss researcher who launched the project succeeds in convincing the authorities to grant him the necessary subsidies which will run in the millions of euros of course.

Source: GVA

News , ,

Urban Trail

Sunday March 12, Antwerp will be a busy place, visited by thousands of runners, since the 5th edition of the Urban Trail will be run. 10,000 participants will run the 10 km long circuit that takes them through the city and its buildings. Last year the athletes ran through the City Hall that celebrated its 450th birthday. This year the athletes will be able to run through the new Harbour House, a project worked out by the recently deceased architect Zaha Hadid, a construction that seems to form a kind of missing link between a ship and a diamond, two important symbols for Antwerp’s wealth.

Since the Harbour House is quite a bit north of city centre, the circuit will be quite different from previous editions.

If you want to participate, you can subscribe through www.urbantrailseries.be , but don’t wait too long as recent editions have sold out in less than two weeks. More details of the circuit will be disclosed bit by bit, and everything can be followed on the site mentioned.

Six weeks later, Antwerp will again welcome athletes by the thousands, as then the 10 Miles race is scheduled.

News, Sports

City folklore pt. 1

A tasty sausage roll for Lost Monday.

The very first Monday after Twelfth Night (Jan. 6) is a very special day for Antwerp. It is called Verloren Maandag (Lost Monday) and is accompanied by free sausage or apple rolls in popular bars. The origins for this feast are very old and nobody really knows what is its origin.

One theory says that the Sunday after Twelfth Night was the day on which new city officials took oath, and on the next day everybody took free, so it was a Lost Monday. A variation on this story tells us that the traditional guilds held festivities for the New Year of the Monday after Twelfth Night. The guild members went from door to door to pass on the dean’s wishes to the population of the town, and of course they also had to call on the doors of inns. To keep the guests a little longer inside and promote the drinking, the patrons offered them a hot salty combination of bread and (cheap) sausage.

Specifically for Antwerp there is a story that it was a tradition for people working in the harbour that on this day they were allowed to eat and drink freely. Of course the bosses chose for food that filled the stomachs in a cheap way and so the traditional sausage roll was invented.

Still another theory says sausage rolls were invented by butchers. They usually had a lot of leftovers from the preceeding festive days and turned these in a roll and to disguise the meat was not that fresh anymore, wrapped it in a dough clothing.

Nowadays sausage rolls can be bought at the baker’s all year round, but on Verloren Maandag the showcase window of every bakery store is filled with the popular rolls.

Should you happen to drop in to a bar on Lost Monday, don’t be surprised if the landlord offers you a hot sausage roll! Cheers!

Eat and drink, Folklore, Going out , , ,

Dageraadplaats – off the beaten track

A very lively neighbourhood with a lot of bars and restaurants can be found at Dageraadplaats, which is the heart of Zurenborg. It may be little known by tourists, but is frequented by locals. This is an area where people of different origins live together, and it shows in the types of restaurants you can find at and around this little square.

The square can easily be reached by public transport (Line 11 has a stop at the square). Moreover, just a few steps away is Cogels-Osylei, a city quarter that was developed in the era of art nouveau and Jugendstil. Fortunately practically all of the houses in this street, and the sidestreets leading up to it, have been protected as monuments. It surely is a unique sight.

Soon I will tell you more about this fascinating area.

Going out, Outdoors , , , , , , , , , , ,

City of Rubens

The most famous name in Antwerp history is undoubtedly Peter Paul Rubens, the Baroque painter.

Come visit Antwerp to (re)discover the master and his works.

Rubens statue at Groenplaats

See his statue, erected to commemorate the 200th anniversary of his death in 1840. The Rubens statue stands in the middle of Groenplaats, one of the city’s busiest places. A popular meeting place for people from Antwerp to start an evening out or a walk in the historic heart of the city.

Behind the statue you can admire the spire of the Our Lady’s Chathedral. Don’t forget to visit the cathedral, as it contains not less than 4 paintings by the master, besides a great many other works of art.

Nearby, just off the busy shopping avenue of Meir, on a square called Wapper, you can find the master’s house which now houses a museum completely devoted to Rubens and his works.

Just a few 100 meters away at Sint-Jacobsmarkt, is Saint James’s church where Rubens was buried. The chapel where the Rubens family was buried is adorned with a painting the master himself selected for his resting place.

Saint Carl Borromeus Church

Not to be missed is the phenomenal Saint Carl Borromeus church, the former jesuit’s church at Conscienceplein. Unfortunately the painted ceilings Rubens provided for this church were lost in a fire, but there are strong signs Rubens contributed to both the façade and the tower of this masterpiece of baroque architecture.

Not so far away, the old dominican church, Saint Paul’s, next to the red light quarter, houses works by Rubens and some of his contemporaries.

Of course many of the other Antwerp museums show works by Rubens, such as the Fine Arts Museum (closed for intensive restauration works until 2019), the Museum Plantin-Moretus (Christoff Plantin was a close friend of Rubens’), the museum Rockoxhuis, …

Monuments, Museums

Red and Blue renamed Cargo Club

Antwerp has a very lively night-life, with two very popular discotheques bordering north of the historical city centre.

Foto: kioni papadopoulos, rr

In the middle of the red light quarter (Schipperskwartier) you’ll find “Café d’Anvers”. Situated in Verversrui the building once housee the popular cinema Ritz, where the poor of the neighbourhood used to hang out the whole afternoon no matter which movie was on the program to save on heating costs in their two room flats, but now welcomes trendy crowds of visitors every weekend.

A bit further on in the Lange Schipperskapelstraat, “Red and Blue” can be found. This last one was very popular with the holebi-population of Flanders. From the middle of January 2017 on, “Red and Blue” will be renamed “Cargo Club” and cater for all kinds of public. Every now and then special holebi-events will be staged under the old “Red and Blue” logo.

Source (text and picture): GVA 

Going out, News ,

Busy times for archeologists

Should you visit Antwerp later this year, you will undoubtedly be confronted with road works and the like, which results in traffic problems every now and then, but don’t forget that every cloud has a silver lining.

Our silver lining is that the road works in the Opera quarter and in the South quarter will teach us a lot about the town’s history, and not only that: parts of the city’s history that have lain hidden for hundreds of years will again become visible. One more reason to come and visit Antwerp.

The Antwerp Opera is built along  a city boulevard that in the sixteenth century was an enormous defensive wall. Recently Rough Guide chose Antwerp as its #5 city to visit in 2017, in the 16th century, an Italian named Guiccardini advised each and every European to visit Antwerp and its defensive wall. The people of Antwerp usually refer to this wall as the Spaanse Vesten (Spanish Walls) as the Netherlands then were part of the reign of Charles V and his son Filip II.

In the 19th century these walls no longer served a defensive role and in stead were a hindrance in the development of the city which was booming thanks to the newly (re)started harbour activities, so the walls were broken down. Fortunately they were only demolished up to ground level: the basements underground were left intact and archeological studies now are revealing these impressive works.

Part of an old bastion in the Spanish Walls laid bare.
This is what the Opera Square will look like when all the works are finished.

Source: Gazet van Antwerpen

News

Antwerp is getting smart

Yesterday (Jan. 5 2017) the city authorities and the Flemish government announced Antwerp is going to be the first smart city in Flanders. In cooperation with IMEC, an organisation of IT-departments of Flemish univerities, the city of Antwerp is going to integrate smart sensors in hundreds of objects: waste baskets, sewers, delivery vans, traffic lights, …

Sensors in waste baskets can trigger messages to warn it is time to come and collect the waste. Sensors in the sewers can monitor the quality of rain water, which yields a lot of information about the quality of the environment in general, sensors in delivery vans can measure the quality of the air in the city, sensors combined with traffic lights deliver information which can be used to steer traffic flows in an optimal way, …

All the data collected allow for a more efficient organisation of city life and as the system is an open system anyone can use them to build his own apps.

Antwerp is the first city in Europe to host such a system, which in time will be rolled out in all Flemish cities, says Flemish Minister of Innovations Philippe Muyters.

Source: Gazet van Antwerpen

News

Saturday Night at the Movies

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In Belgium movies are shown in the original language and are subtitled for the local public, so there’s no reason why you should not go to the movies on Saturday night.

Antwerp has always had a fascination for cinema. Already early in 1896 performances were offered to an eager public, barely months after the first performances by the Lumière brothers in Paris. Already in 1908 Antwerp had its own cinemas and in the era immediately before and immediately after World War II the city housed more than 100 cinemas. But then television came and cinema lost much of its appeal and in 1973 the main cinema mogul in Antwerp went bankrupt.

Fortunately the multiplex took over and Antwerp now has two large cinema centres: one in the Central Station area (historically the place where the main cinemas were situated) run by UGC, the other north of the city along Noorderlaan, on a former GMC-plant run by Kinepolis. Both offer a varied programme of mostly English spoken movies.

Independent productions are shown in Cartoon’s, which is situated in Kaasstraat, bordering on the quays of the river Scheldt.

Going out

Antwerp among top 5 destinations

The British travel guide publisher ‘Rough Guide to…’ has put Antwerp on the #5 spot of its ‘Top 10 Best Cities to Visit’ for the new year. It praises our city for its gorgeous architecture, for its many museums, its bars, its harbour, its fashion stores, … More than one reason to visit the city, which is worth a stay of a few days.

Another feature that is mentioned is its size: Antwerp is not as immense and overpowering as New York, Tokyo, Paris, London, … but still large enough ‘to offer all the exitement of a big metropolis’.

More information on Antwerp on The Rough Guide. To see the list of Top 10 destinations, click here.

News, Publications

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