| The seat of the Counts of Flanders and the largest town in western
Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, GHENT was at the
heart of the Flemish cloth trade. By 1350, the city boasted a population
of 50,000, of whom no less than 5000 were directly involved in the
industry. However, the cloth trade began to decline in the early
sixteenth century and although many of the city's merchants switched to
exporting surplus grain from France, Ghent slowly declined. Better times
returned in the nineteenth century when Ghent industrialized and it's
now the third largest city in Belgium. Ghent is a less immediately
picturesque place than Bruges, but this is much to its advantage in so
far as it's never overrun by tourists.
The City
The best place to start exploring is at the mainly Gothic St Baaf's
Cathedral , squeezed into the corner of St Baafsplein (daily: April-Oct
8.30am-6pm, Nov-March 8.30am-5pm; free). Inside, a small chapel (April-Oct
Mon-Sat 9.30am-5pm, Sun 1-6pm; Nov-March Mon-Sat 10.30am-4pm, Sun 2-5pm;
¬2.50 includes the crypt) holds Ghent's greatest treasure, the
altarpiece of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb , an early fifteenth-century
work believed to be by Jan van Eyck. The cover screens display an
Annunciation scene with the archangel Gabriel's wings reaching up to the
timbered ceiling of a Flemish house; on the inside - only revealed when
the shutters were opened on Sundays and feast days - the upper level
shows God the Father, the Virgin and John the Baptist, while in the
lower panel is the Lamb, approached by various figures in paradise, seen
as a sort of idealized Low Countries - look closely and you can see the
cathedrals of Bruges, Utrecht and Maastricht. The twelfth-century crypt
(same times) preserves features of the earlier Romanesque church of St
John, along with murals painted between 1480 and 1540.
Just west of St Baaf's, the fifteenth-century Lakenhalle (Cloth Hall) is
little more than an empty shell, whose first-floor entrance leads to the
adjoining Belfry (tours daily; ¬2.50), a much-amended edifice from the
fourteenth century. A glass-sided lift climbs up to the roof for
excellent views over the city centre. A few strides away to the north is
the Stadhuis (tours May-Oct Mon-Thurs 3pm; ¬2.50), whose long facade was
erected in two phases - the earlier and more flamboyant section was
designed by Rombout Keldermans. Each ornate niche was intended to hold a
statuette, but the money ran out; the present carvings, representing the
powerful and famous - including Keldermans himself rubbing his chin and
studying his plans for the building - were only inserted at the end of
the last century.
A couple of minutes' walk from the Stadhuis, Korenlei forms the western
side of the old city harbour, home to a series of expansive, high-gabled
merchants' houses dating from the eighteenth century. In architectural
contrast, the Graslei , opposite, holds the squat, gabled guild- and
warehouses of the town's medieval boatmen and grain-weighers. A few
minutes north of here is the sinister-looking 's Gravensteen (daily:
April-Sept 9am-6pm, Oct-March 9am-5pm, last ticket 45 minutes before
closing; ¬5) or Castle of the Counts, whose interior holds an assembly
room with a magnificent stone fireplace and a gruesome collection of
torture instruments. North of here, Braderijstraat leads to Lievekaai ,
Ghent's second oldest harbour, while east of the castle are the part-gentrified,
seventeenth-century lanes and alleys of the Patershol , home to the Huis
van Alijn Volkskunde , Kraanlei 65 (Tues-Sun 9am-12.30pm & 1.30-5.30pm;
¬2.50; www.aijn.gent.be ), a series of restored almshouses where a
delightful chain of period rooms depicts local life and work in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
South of the centre, Ghent's main shopping street, Veldstraat , heads
off towards the impressive Museum voor Schone Kunsten , fifteen minutes'
walk away at Nicolaas de Liemaeckereplein 3, Citadelpark (Tues-Sun
9.30am-5pm; ¬2.50; www.finearts.museum.gent.be ). Here, there's a first-rate
sample of old masters including Bosch's Carrying of the Cross and the
smaller, less well-known St Jerome at Prayer , along with work by Pieter
Bruegel the Younger, Jordaens, Van Dyck and Frans Hals. Opposite, the
old casino has been turned into SMAK (Tues-Sun 10am-6pm; ¬5; www.smak.be
), a museum of contemporary art, which illustrates every major artistic
movement since 1945.
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from $151.03
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