Bruges' baby sister (and the far nicer town)

I arrived in Ghent just before lunch and headed from the station to my B&B. There isn’t much in the way of hostel accommodation in Ghent as it tends to be somewhere that people visit as a day trip from either Brussels or Bruges (if they visit at all). But it is well worth a day or two or your time with a few very very good museums and some fabulous churches. 

It was a lovely day, so I headed straight into the centre of town to check things out. Ghent is fairly compact with most of the sights within 10 minutes walk of each other except for the museums which are on the edge of town. After a quick lunch, I headed to St Michael’s bridge which supposedly has the best views of the town. It was spoiled a bit by the building works which are going on around the front of St Nicolas. You do get good views of the towers of the churches and the belfort in the centre of town and if you look up the canal you can see the castle as well. 

I then walked through to look at the towers. I walked past St Nicolas and onto the Belfort. It was originally just a tower but now has a couple of buildings attached to it; one of which is home to the tourist info centre. The square beyond the belfort is quite lovely and has a large fountain in the middle and a pretty theatre on one side. The other side is dominated by St Bavo’s cathedral. It opens on Mondays (most of the other museums are closed) so I decided to go in and have a look. The church is famous for its Adoration of the Lamb altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers and this is kept in a separate room on one side of the entrance. The church is free but you have to pay to see the altar. When I arrived, a Japanese tour group had just gone in to see the altar so I decided to start with the church. 

There has been a church on the side since the middle of the 10th century but the current church was built between the 13th and 16th centuries. The crypt dates from the 12th century. The building has had a bad run with fires, storms, iconoclasts and the like so a large restoration was done in the 19th century. 

The pulpit is another superb example of naturalistic baroque from the 18th century with the tree of knowledge and a giant golden snake eating the apples. Many of the side chapels were redecorated during the 19th century so are neo-gothic though most have older paintings. Like all good Belgian churches they have an impressive collection of Flemish Masters including de Crayer and Coxie. Unfortunately at the moment the choir is being renovated and they have the entire thing sealed off behind walls. I was a bit confused when I first walked into the church and came up against a big white wall at the end of the nave but they have built them to keep the dust out of the rest of the church. 

The crypt is also open and is mostly Romanesque in style. It’s huge and covers most of the area beneath the choir and the chapels. They use it to display various church items like clothes, statues, relics, hymn books and devotional dolls. This seems to be where much of the gothic items got put when they got new baroque ones for upstairs. There is also a small section that has some of the original 12th century wall paintings. One of the weirdest items is a painting of Jesus standing in a fountain with blood spouting from his side and the people of the town coming and collecting his blood in containers. 

Back upstairs I set off around the outside of the choir. It’s a bit hard to see some of the paintings as it’s quite dark inside and many of the chapels had the gates locked so you couldn’t go in. The chapel of the Blessed Sacrament is directly behind the choir and has a spectacular pair of baroque graves for a pair of bishops who were brothers. They are enormous (heading towards the size of the main altar really). The one on the left has a statue of the reclining bishop, two women, four angels, two roman soldiers and Christ carrying the cross. There is also a crucifix, an anchor and a large arch with a skull on it. His brother’s grave on the other side has the bishop, the women and the angels but has a Madonna and Child instead of the Roman soldiers and Jesus. 

By the time I made it back to the front of the church, the Japanese had moved on so I headed into the altar. There is a copy of it in the side chapel where the original used to be but it is worth going in to see the real thing. There is an audioguide included in the price and it is really well put together and gives you history about the artists and the altar as well as going through it panel by panel and explaining various points. It was painted in the early 15th century by the Van Eyck brothers. It was started by the older brother, Hubert who was less well known as an artist but he died before completing it. His more famous brother, Jan  then completed the work. They have been unable to work out who painted what as their styles are very similar. It’s a big altar and the people who commissioned it must have been very wealthy. 

The altar features several paintings with the top set depicting heaven and the bottom section depicting a scene from the book of Revelations, the Adoration of the Lamb (hence the name of the altar). The top has Adam, the Heavenly Choir, the Virgin Mary, God/Jesus (they aren’t sure which it is meant to be), John the Baptist, the Heavenly Orchestra and Eve. The choir and orchestra panels show some of the earliest use of perspective in Flemish gothic paintings. Oddly given that the background is so advanced, all the angels have the same face. 

The bottom row has the judges, the knights, the adoration of the lamb, the hermits and the holy pilgrims. The scene is from the book of Revelations which was particularly popular with the Flemish Primitives and is painted in fabulously bright colours. There are hundreds of figures some of which have been identified and some of which are unclear. I’m not surprised that it took years of work to complete. The back of the altar is also visible and has the donors and their patron saints (the two St Johns) as well as a large Annunciation. It’s in muted colours and is nowhere near as striking as the front. I was lucky to be leaving just as the next Japanese tour group was coming in. 

I walked around the outside of the church but they are working on it as well and you can’t see much of it for the scaffolding. I had a quick look at the palace on the canal next to the church which I assume is where the bishop used to live. I looped back around to the town hall which is a funny kind of building. It has been built in two completely different styles and they have literally just tacked the newer section onto the old one. So one end is typical gothic with lots of statues in niches and the other end is renaissance and really quite plain. It’s worth having a good look at the statues too. One of the blokes must have been so ugly as they have carved his statue in a full set of armour with the visor on his helmet down. 

I then headed down the street and across the river to the Gravensteen which is the old castle. It’s built on the slight hill next to the river where they can watch both forks. It’s a funny building with a long history. It was built in the 12th/13th century as a home for the dukes but since then has been used as a prison, courthouse and in the 19th century was even used as a cotton mill. It eventually fell into disuse until in the late 20th century they decided to tart it up as a tourist attraction. Inside the buildings are a couple of little museums with armour and weapons and then torture items. The torture museum is almost amusingly 1970s with dummies (complete with mullets) demonstrating some of the more unusual methods of torture. They have a large collection of executioners knifes and swords from a family that had generations of executioners. There are lots of the swords around because thoughtfully, they had laws that governed how many executions could be performed with each sword. 

The views from the top of the castle are really good and you can see all of the city. It’s quite windy up the top and I was glad that it was a sunny day. The views from the castle walls are also good and you get to visit the little chapel which was renovated to become a torture chamber. 

I should just mention the Ghent Museum Pass which is also pretty good value. It’s 20 euros for the pass and it gets you one entry into all of the museums and the belfort (over a three day period) as  well as being a public transport pass for 3 days. It’s about 6-8 euros for most of the attractions so the pass becomes good value once you want to do 3 or more places in your time there. I managed to get good value out of it in only 2 days and you could probably make it worth it in one if you started early in the day. 

I left the castle and headed across to the belfort as it was still nice weather and I couldn’t guarantee that for Tuesday would be nice as well. Now a major bonus of this belfort is that they have a lift and as I was feeling a little unwell, I took advantage of it. You do have to tackle a few steps to get to the lift so it’s not disabled access but it does make for a much quicker trip to the top. There are several stops on the way that have various little exhibitions and the bells/carillon. Just a warning for the claustrophobic, the last section of stairs before the top are very very narrow and very dark so I would catch the lift the whole way up. The platform at the top is also narrow but has a nice chest high barrier so isn’t too bad for those with height issues. The narrowness also means that you have to go around in the same direction as everyone else and there are only some sections where you can pass people without getting very up close and personal. The views are fantastic and there isn’t any mesh to block the views so you can get some great photos. 

I had dinner down near the university at the first solely vegetarian restaurant that I had seen in Belgium. It’s also got vegan dishes on the menu and I had a fantastic vegie pasta. Then it was back to the B&B to enjoy my massive bathroom (complete with a bath) and having my own room for the first time in quite a while. 

Breakfast at the B&B was fantastic with homemade jam and nice bread and pastries. After eating far more than I needed, I headed down along the edge of town to the museum district to go to the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s on the edge of a park with the museum of Modern Art across the road. I would have liked to go around the park as it’s meant to be really lovely but it was starting to rain so I decided to give it a miss. 

It’s a very impressive collection for a provincial museum and it’s well displayed. The audioguide is worth getting and for the other items not included in it there are handouts in each room in four languages. It covers from around 15th century through to 19th century and has mostly paintings but some sculpture. I won’t go on about the art because I know that many of you aren’t all that interested but they have most of the usual Flemish artists as well as some that are talented but less well known and they actually have a modern collection that interested me (which is quite an achievement). The temporary collection at the moment is Emile Claus who was a Flemish expressionist from the 19th century. I must complain too about the very poor collection of postcards of the older art in this museum. They have plenty from things made post 1800 but very little of the earlier stuff. 

I headed back up into town to find some lunch as it had taken nearly 3 hours to get around the art gallery. There are a few buildings to look at on the way back up to the centre but all in all it’s fairly dull and you pass a lot of offices. I ended up at the market place which is on the northern side of the centre. It’s got a few attractive buildings and a big statue in the middle. It does have the best friets stall in Belgium though so is definitely worth a visit. They still don’t top the ones from Haarlem but they get a lot closer than most. So I sat in the square and at my chips and garlic sauce before heading across the river to St Michael’s church. 

St Michael’s was founded in the 11th century but the current building was started in the 15th century and finished in the 19th century (they had some serious funding issues for about 400 years). I must say that this church is a bit of a hidden gem in Ghent. There weren’t that many people there compared to the other churches but it has a better collection of Baroque religious art than the museum (and it lets you take photos). It’s quite dark inside and a lot of the art needs some restoration but the church is short on cash (it seems to be the story of their life). It’s free to go in but they ask for a donation and you can also buy booklets and postcards at the little store at the entrance. They have works by van Dyck, de Crayer, Pieter Pepers (he did marble statues) and van den Heuvels. The only thing that they lack is a Rubens but they do have work by his master and one of his pupils. 

I headed next to the Church of St Nicolas which was a bit disappointing. It has a lot of modern art inside and they have covered up much of the stonework to display this. If you are going past, you could drop in but I wouldn’t bother going out of the way to see it. 

My final stop for the afternoon was the design museum which has got an ecclectic but great collection of applied arts. They have a mix of temporary exhibits (at the moment they have textiles, finnish chairs, art deco printing and books) and permanent collections of modern furniture, art nouveau, glassware, Baroque and regency furniture. The front section is in an old hotel and has rooms set up as they were in the 18th and 19th centuries. They are doing renovations on the building at the moment so some sections aren’t open and the courtyard is full of scaffolding. While there isn’t much written information in this museum and much of what there is, is in Dutch, most of the stuff is self explanatory (it’s a couch, it’s a teapot, etc) and this museum is well worth a couple of hours of your time. 

I wandered around the centre for a little while looking for somewhere to have dinner but was having one of those nights where nowhere had exactly what I wanted (though I wasn’t really sure what that was in the first place, just what it wasn’t). I ended up at a pizza place down near the uni and had quite a nice meal (and it was reasonably cheap). 

I still had a couple of places that I wanted to see in Ghent but I decided to spend Wednesday in Brussels to visit the Museum of Fine Arts there. So read about Brussels in the next entry. 

I got back from Brussels in the late afternoon and had a trial getting into town. I decided that I was too tired to walk from the train station (it’s about 45 minutes walk) so I lined up to wait for a tram. Several trams went past in the opposite direction but nothing seemed to be heading into town. The crowd was growing until after 30 minutes many of them gave up and headed into town on foot. I was adamant that I was going to get on a tram though, so continued to wait. Eventually one turned up and we set off. We didn’t get even halfway though before we came to a stop. Someone had parked too close to the tramlines and the driver didn’t think that he could get through. With much work on the part of a very helpful postie who happened to be passing, we eventually made it through. He had to hold the mirror in against the van to let us through with less than an inch to spare. Most of the people on the tram had got off to walk at this point though we did pass them all on the way up the street and some of them got back on. In the end it took 45 minutes to get to the centre of town. 

I headed out and splurged on a nice dinner since it was my last night in Belgium. Then I wandered around in the dusk for a little taking some more photos of town. It was quite late when I got back and I had to stay up and finish packing as I had to get up early to go to Brussels  to catch the Eurostar. In the morning, I had another fabulous breakfast before lugging my stuff to the station and heading on to London.