Ghent

• 1. Introduction

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  Ghent sits at the point where two rivers meet: the Scheldt and the Leie. That junction has drawn people since the Stone Age and the Iron Age, long before anyone thought to give the place a name. The name that eventually stuck, Ghent, most likely descends from a Celtic word meaning confluence or river mouth. By the 13th century, this river city had grown into the largest settlement in all of Europe north of the Alps, save for Paris alone. Up to 65,000 people lived within its walls. Then came a slow retreat. Wars, revolts, and shifting trade routes pulled power elsewhere. Yet that retreat left something unexpected behind: a medieval city so intact that tourists now travel from across the world to see it. How did a city once rivalling Cologne and Moscow become a quiet marvel of preserved stone and festival crowds? And what does it mean today, with its vegetarian canteens, bicycle boulevards, and Nobel laureates, to be Ghent?

• 2. A City Built on Wool

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  Around 650, Saint Amand founded two abbeys in Ghent: St. Peter's, known as Blandinium, and St. Bavo's Abbey. Those religious foundations formed two of the nuclei around which the city grew, alongside a commercial centre on the rivers. The commercial heart gained its engine from a landscape detail that might seem unremarkable: the land around the rivers flooded periodically, producing rich water-meadows the locals called meersen, a word related to the English marsh. Those meadows were ideal for grazing sheep, and the wool of those sheep became cloth.

  Ghent became the leading European city for cloth manufacture during the Middle Ages. Wool was imported from Scotland and England to feed the looms. When the Hundred Years' War disrupted that trade, the industry suffered, but the city's identity as a weaving centre had already been set deep. The belfry and the towers of St. Bavo's Cathedral and St. Nicholas' Church rose above a skyline that cloth money had built. Even the Vikings noticed. In 851 and again in 879, they plundered Ghent. The city recovered under the protection of the County of Flanders, and from the 11th century it grew into something approaching a small city-state, its wealth anchored to thread and loom.

• 3. Emperors and Noose Bearers

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  In 1500, Juana of Castile gave birth in Ghent to a boy who would become Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. The city that produced him would come to regret his reign. When Ghent revolted in 1539, Charles did not forget where he was from. He punished the city by forcing its nobles to walk barefoot before the Emperor with a noose, a strop in Dutch, around each neck. From that humiliation the people of Ghent took a lasting name for themselves: Stroppendragers, the noose bearers. St. Bavo's Abbey, the ancient foundation from the 7th century, was torn down and replaced with a fortress for Royal Spanish troops. Only a small portion of the abbey survived demolition.

  The story of Ghent's defiance did not begin with Charles. The city had earlier led two revolts alongside Bruges against Maximilian of Austria, the first Habsburg to rule Flanders. Before that, in 1453, high taxes had triggered a rebellion that ended at the Battle of Gavere, where Ghent suffered a severe defeat at the hands of Philip the Good. Each confrontation with the powerful ended badly for the city, yet the habit of resistance seems to have outlasted the punishments. The Dutch word strop, and the stubborn pride it encodes, is still carried by Ghent's residents today.

• 4. The Treaty That Ended a War

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  Christmas Eve of 1814 brought delegates from Great Britain and the United States to Ghent for a signing that would close a conflict fought largely on the other side of the Atlantic. The Treaty of Ghent formally ended the War of 1812, which the source describes as the North American phase of the Napoleonic Wars. The city's role as a diplomatic venue was not accidental. Ghent sat inside the complex of territories then being reshuffled by the Congress of Vienna, which in 1815 folded Ghent and Flanders into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.

  The industrial dimension of that same era had arrived a decade and a half earlier. Lieven Bauwens smuggled the plans for mechanical weaving machines out of England and introduced the first such machine on the European continent in 1800. The textile industry, which had flagged for so long, began to revive. The city also established its own university in 1816 and opened a new sea connection between 1824 and 1827. Then the Belgian Revolution of 1830-31 cut off port access to the sea for more than a decade, the local economy collapsed, and the first Belgian trade union took root in Ghent. A 1913 world exhibition drew international attention, and the Sint-Pieters railway station was completed in 1912 as part of the preparations.

• 5. Survival and Liberation

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  Ghent was occupied by German forces in both world wars. The experience of World War I occupation was recorded from the inside by H. Wandt in a work titled etappenleven te Gent. The city escaped severe physical destruction in both conflicts, which helps explain why so much of its medieval fabric survives. The liberation in World War II arrived on the 6th of September 1944, when the British 7th Armoured Division, known as the Desert Rats, entered Ghent alongside local Belgian fighters. The northern suburbs and the industrial area were cleared over the following days by the 15th (Scottish) Infantry Division.

  The intact state of the historic centre, which resulted partly from that survival, is now recognised at the highest levels of heritage protection. UNESCO designated the beguinages and the belfry with its adjacent cloth hall as World Heritage Sites in 1998 and 1999. The architecture that tourists walk through today includes St. Bavo's Cathedral, the Gravensteen castle, and the old Graslei harbour front. In the 19th century, Louis Roelandt built the university hall Aula, the opera house, and the main courthouse. Later, Henry Van de Velde designed the university's Boekentoren, or Book Tower, which stands as one of the highlights of the city's modern architectural layer.

• 6. Festivals, Food, and Cycling

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  The Ghent Festival, Gentse Feesten in Dutch, has been running since 1969. For ten days each summer it draws roughly 1 to 1.5 million visitors. The 2020 and 2021 editions were cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium; the festival resumed in 2022. The Festival of Flanders marked its 50th celebration in 2008, opening in Ghent with the OdeGand City festivities each second Saturday of September, when some 50 concerts spread across the medieval inner city and around 250 international artists perform. Ghent co-hosted the 2021 World Choir Games with Antwerp, and the city was named the 2024 European Youth Capital by the European Youth Forum.

  The culinary identity of Ghent carries its own specific textures. Bakeries in the city and across East Flanders sell a donut-shaped bun called a mastel, essentially a bagel, which is also known as Saint Hubert bread because bakers bring their batches to be blessed at early Mass on the 3rd of November, the feast day of Saint Hubert. A tradition held that the blessed bread immunized against rabies. At the other end of the spice register sits Tierenteyn, a hot mustard with affinities to French Dijon, available from a local producer. The city also promotes meat-free Thursdays, Donderdag Veggiedag, across public canteens and city-funded schools, a campaign tied to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's finding that meat production represents nearly one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

  Ghent's cycling infrastructure is the largest designated cyclist area in Europe, with nearly 400 km of cycle paths and more than 700 one-way streets where bicycles may travel against traffic. The city also holds the distinction of Belgium's first bicycle boulevard. In 2017 the city altered traffic circulation on over 80 streets and changed 2,500 road signs across a single weekend, more than doubling the car-free zone in the historic centre. The Six Days of Ghent, a six-day track cycling race, is held annually in the Kuipke velodrome. In 1997, at the Flanders Sports Arena, two-time Olympic champion Hicham El Guerrouj set an indoor world record of 3:48.45 in the mile run.