The carvings were everywhere, hidden high on the facades of the old townhouses, and once I noticed them, I couldn’t stop looking up. Little stone panels of flutes and deer and saints, all of them telling a story that had nothing to do with art for art’s sake. “What was the idea behind these reliefs? ” I asked my guide.
“Well, there were no house numbers back then,” she said. “So when you knew the area you had to go to, people described their house by its name. ‘I’m in the house with the flying deer. ’ Or the flute player, because you can see him at the top.
”
For centuries, these tiny works of art were the address system of Ghent. And the story of how we got real house numbers? They say Napoleon was responsible. Not for house numbers exactly, but for numbering the brothels of Brussels.
Number one was almost respectable. Number twelve, or *doze*, was the most scandalous. To this day, if a man in Flanders is heading somewhere indecent, people say he’s going to a *caberdouchka*, which is just our way of saying *cabaret douze*. Cabaret number twelve.
From brothels and emperors, I went looking for a dragon. The Belfry of Ghent has stood in the heart of the old city since 1313, a UNESCO symbol of the city’s wealth and independence. Once it held the Cloth Hall and the city’s treasures. And its greatest treasure is still up there, hundreds of steps up, where the city mascot sits waiting.
He’s a fire-breathing dragon, and he’s been perched on top of the Belfry since 1377. He was supposedly the protector of the city’s charters and laws. But here’s the curious part: the dragon of Ghent isn’t from Ghent at all. Legend says he started as a figurehead on a Norwegian ship in the 12th century, was gifted to Constantinople and lived inside Hagia Sophia, then a Flemish count carried him back to Belgium.
Not to Ghent, but to Bruges. And then the citizens of Ghent allegedly stole him back through a narrow alley and placed him high atop the Belfry, where he has watched over the city ever since. From the dragon, I could see all the way to our next stop: the Castle of the Counts of Flanders, the Gravensteen. It dates back to 1180 and looks straight out of a medieval saga, complete with its moat.
But what made me curious was why a castle would be built right in the middle of a city instead of on a hill. “There was a reason,” my guide said. “You had rich merchants here because of the wool industry. Rich merchants who wanted a say in politics.
There was always a bit of competition between the citizens and the count. So the count said, ‘I’m going to move closer into the city, because I want to keep a close eye on them. ’”
But even that castle wasn’t good enough for one count. In the 14th century, Count Van Male decided he wanted a new place entirely.
Not one castle, but an entire complex with more than three hundred rooms, gorgeous gardens, and even a zoo, all encircled by a medieval wall. Nothing remains of it today except a single gate, now called the Dark Gate. Inside, though, is a peaceful green oasis in the heart of the city. Ghent began along the water, and that’s how I explored it next.
The winding rivers once carried goods in and out, creating the wealth that paid for all those elegant guild houses. Following the river led me to where the city itself began: St. Peter’s Abbey, founded in the 7th century. It was a Benedictine abbey that grew into an entire village, with farms, gardens, a church complex, and homes.
The church once owned all the land from the modern city center all the way to this point. Most of those farms are now St. Peter’s Square, but a small piece of the vineyard has been preserved, right along the river, just as it’s been for centuries. The Abbey is beautiful, but there is another church in Ghent that rivals it.
And inside St. Bavo’s Cathedral hides one of the most important Flemish masterpieces in history. St. Bavo was a monk who lived in Ghent in the 7th century, and the cathedral that bears his name dates back to the 10th century.
It’s a Gothic masterpiece now, but traces of the older Romanesque design survive in the crypt below. Upstairs, it houses works by Rubens and others. But the great treasure is a super-sized one: the legendary Ghent Altarpiece, painted by Jan and Hubert van Eyck in 1432 specifically for this cathedral. In fact, specifically for this side chapel.
How do we know? Because the light falling on the figures in the painting matches the light coming from the real window up to the right. The painting is formally called the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, and the lamb at its center, representing Jesus, is considered one of the finest works of northern Renaissance art ever made. Standing in front of it is spectacular.
But here’s the twist: this isn’t the real one. The original was moved behind glass in the 1980s, and it’s been there ever since. But it hasn’t always stayed in Ghent. Far from it.
“It was very coveted by a lot of not-so-nice people,” my guide said with a laugh. During the 16th-century religious wars, it was hidden in the cathedral’s tower. During the French occupation at the end of the 18th century, its four center panels were taken to the Louvre in Paris. After Waterloo, the center panels came back.
But the trustees of the church sold the side panels, the wings, to a dealer. Just sold them, as if they were ordinary doors. They ended up in Berlin. After World War I, all the pieces were finally recovered.
But the reunion didn’t last long. During World War II, the whole altarpiece was hidden in Pau, France. Hitler found it and brought it to Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. Then, as the Allies advanced from Normandy, the painting was moved again, hidden deep inside the salt mines of Altaussee.
There, American troops found it in 1945. “We are very grateful to the Monuments Men,” my guide said. The heroic group of mostly American art experts who recovered artworks stolen by the Nazis. The Ghent Altarpiece was one of their most important recoveries.
But there was one more problem. The most famous panel, the centerpiece of the whole work, wasn’t in the cathedral. It was at the MSK Museum, where the altarpiece has been undergoing restoration for years. I was lucky enough to witness the work in person.
Tiny surgical scalpels, some fine enough for eye surgery, gently chipping away at the overpainting. Layer by layer, the original Van Eyck was being revealed. Colors more vivid, shadows more crisp. The reason for all that paint?
It wasn’t just theft. The altarpiece was used in daily mass in the 15th century, opened and closed regularly with candles burning, which caused paint loss. Then, around 1550, skilled painters were asked to overpaint the surface to hide old repairs and refresh the colors that had tarnished under layers of varnish. Now, finally, all those restorations were being chipped away to reveal the original beauty.
And there was a surprise waiting underneath. The head of the central lamb had been completely repainted. Van Eyck’s original lamb has a human face, with eyes set forward like a human’s and small ears lower down. When it was overpainted, artists moved the eyes to the sides and added larger ears at the same level, making the lamb look like a neutral animal.
Now, with the overpainting gone, the lamb had its original gaze back. A confronting, fascinating gaze. For centuries, people were looking at the wrong version of the center of the entire masterpiece. There is one last piece to this puzzle.
Even after the restored center panel is nestled back into place in St. Bavo’s, one panel won’t be replaced anytime soon. Remember the mirror in the bottom left corner? That stands in for the missing Just Judges panel, stolen in 1934.
To this day, no one knows where it is, or if it even still exists. The mirror was added by a modern Flemish artist as a clever statement: so that you, the viewer, become one of the judges inside the painting. After all that art, I wanted to taste something more. Ghent’s culinary history is as curious as its landmarks.
There are the cuberdons, little purple cone-shaped jelly candies called Ghent noses because they look like noses. And then there is the Tierenteyn-Verlent Mustard Shop, with its crescent moon sign hanging outside, dating back to the days when most townsfolk couldn’t read and had to look for a symbol to find the right shop. The shop itself dates to 1790. The story goes that a member of the family learned stone-grinding mustard making in Dijon, France, and brought the craft back to Belgium.
The ingredients are simple: mustard seeds, vinegar, salt. No preservatives. But the method is unique, giving the mustard its runny, smooth texture and its serious kick. “Is the method a secret?
” I asked. “That’s what I thought,” the shopkeeper said with a smile. And then there’s the lace. Fine lace making in Flanders goes back to the 15th century, made entirely by hand by women.
And those delicate patterns? They say the whole craft was inspired by the intricacy of a spider’s web. Tiny bobbins pass over each other like a dance, creating pieces so fine you can see the little knots that prove they’re handmade. If you can’t see the knots, it’s machine work.
From the castle where a count kept an eye on his rebellious merchants, to the dragon stolen from Bruges, to a masterpiece hidden in salt mines and restored one surgical scalpel at a time, Ghent is overflowing with stories carved into its facades and hidden in its churches. As the Flemish say: veel hier reis. So much to be curious about.
