Basking in the light in Leiden

Near-gale-force winds and incessant rain descended on Leiden this year on Palm Sunday, foreshadowing the imminent arrival of Cyclone Niklas.

A lovely city with pristine canals, friendly citizens, townhouses lining a fascinating web of streets and a wonderful historical legacy, Leiden is no stranger to dramatic shifts in the weather. 

While the stone exteriors of its towering churches shine more subtly in suddenly darkening skies, their hallowed interiors can also become sanctuaries in more than a spiritual sense when the wind starts howling and mangled umbrellas tumble along the glistening cobblestone streets. 

While signs of secularism are everywhere in the modern Netherlands, two churches on leafy Lange Mare Street are testament to religious tolerance. Braving steady rain, church-goers emerging from services at the Marekerk (the Church of Mary) a week before Easter dashed to their cars, while the hardier ones mounted bicycles. The octagonal, bell-shaped structure with its massive pulpit was erected in 1639, the town’s first Protestant church. 

By then Protestantism had become the prevailing faith in northern Europe. The Spanish who occupied the Low Countries were forced to withdraw following what was called the Relief of Leiden, when Calvinist “Sea Beggar” forces swept in along with a change in the weather. They promptly banned Catholicism, and it remained so for two centuries. Only in 1836 was a new Catholic church built – the neoclassical Hartebrugkerk. 

The Hartebrugkerk’s piedmont bears a Latin legend that translates as “This is the house of God and the gate to heaven.” The pathway to that gate in Leiden, however, has at times been torturous. In his book “Rembrandt’s Eyes”, Simon Schma describes the city before 1573 as “moderately prosperous” and afterwards as “history’s playground”.

On October 3, 1574, a few days before the Relief of Leiden, “in what most pious Dutchmen considered a direct intervention by the Almighty”, Mike Dash explains in “Tulipomania”, “the wind changed in direction, a huge storm arose, heavy rain fell, and the river waters surged forward until the Spanish soldiers were forced to flee … The epic resistance saved the Dutch Revolt.”

Imagery memorialising these epochal moments that paved the way for the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age can be seen in Leiden’s stately Museum de Lakenhal. 

In a hall dedicated to the Relief, the machinations of history are reflected in the look of gratitude in the eyes of a young girl receiving herring and bread in Pieter van Veen’s enormous painting “Feeding the Liberated Leidenaars”. The citizenry was fortunate to have survived the long ordeal of Spanish rule. The Sea Beggars arrived to stave off starvation, and now, every October 3, the town celebrates its liberation with more bread and herring. Pickled “new herring”, eaten raw and surprisingly tasty, remains the Netherlands’ national dish, enjoyed year-round at stalls decorated with the country’s flag. 

A silent but emotionally moving video is screened at the museum, featuring a map depicting polder land – low-lying areas reclaimed from the sea through the use of dykes – inundated after William the Silent, founder of the ruling House of Orange, ordered that the cropland so painstakingly drained be flooded again to allow passage for the Sea Beggars’ boats. Paintings recall a time when the landscape was filled with windmills. 

“The windmills,” writes Schma of the early Golden Age, “were the first things you saw on the approaches to Leiden.” Yet none of the 19 windmills that once ringed the city, pumping water and crushing grain, remain. 

Erected two centuries after the siege, the Molen de Valk windmill is a museum that still grinds grain and also contains the nation’s last remaining traditional miller’s residence. From the high deck you can feel the powerful wind from the North Sea while taking in the view of the Marekerk and Hartebrugkerk, rising prominently in the foreground, and the older, gothic Hooglandsekerk, where the city’s origins are recorded.

In the Golden Age, a resident named Johannes Polyander described the elegance of the Rapenburg canal that runs into the city from the Molen de Valk. His words still ring true: “Leiden is the cleanest and most beautiful city [in Holland] and the most beautiful canal in Leiden is Rapenburg.” 

Fresh air and bright light filled the boyhood home of artist Rembrandt van Rijn on the canal, ensuring a healthy childhood and instilling an uncanny sense of perspective in this most celebrated of Old Masters. It’s a short stroll to the Rapenburg’s most famous destination, Leiden University. Founded in 1575 by William the Silent as a declaration of cultural independence from Spain, the institute is popular among travellers for its extraordinary Hortus Botanicus, Europe’s oldest botanical garden. In summer it becomes a gorgeous expanse of parkland and tall greenhouses. You can ascend a staircase that Albert Einstein once scaled, past a legend in Latin promising the attainment of higher truths for anyone prepared to eschew cowardliness, to reach the dim halls of the Academic Building. You might run into dapper university beadle Willem van Beelen, pocket watch in hand, and feel like you’ve stumbled into Dumbledore. Van Beelen will don his robe and carry a mace to lead a tradition-rich academic ceremony in the great hall downstairs.

Every February 8 sees the grand dies natalis, with speeches, songs and the conferring of honorary degrees. Professors and students process to the Pieterskerk, Leiden’s oldest church, where the university was inaugurated that day in 1575. The basilica’s magnificence can be appreciated on quieter days in utter solitude.

The appeal of this city with its indelible links to the true Dutch identity is ideally appreciated from the Burcht van Leiden, the small ring-castle built nearly a millennium ago. Climb to its ramparts and you can see the city the same way viewers were meant to see Rembrandt’s monumental painting of Christ, “The Ascension”, “where one can stand at a distance, so it will sparkle at its best”. 

Fairytale Leiden remains forever radiant.

 

IF YOU GO

It’s best to get in and out of Leiden by train. The journey takes 10 to 15 minutes from The Hague and 20 minutes from Schiphol Airport, the country’s principal airport. From Amsterdam it takes 30 to 40 minutes.