Everything about Sint-bavokerk totally explained
The
Grote Kerk or
St.-Bavokerk is the largest church in the
Dutch city of
Haarlem. It is dedicated to
Saint Bavo.
It is built in the
Gothic style of
architecture and started its life as a
Catholic church. It has been a
cathedral from 1559 until it was confiscated in
1578 and converted to
Protestantism. Subsequently a new Catholic cathedral known as the
Cathedral of Saint Bavo was built in Haarlem.
Until 1831 graves were made in the church. A local story is that there's a grave of a child who used to hit his mother. After a time his hand started growing above his grave, and a copper plate had to be installed on the grave to stop the hand from growing.
Bells
Legend has is that the two upper bells in the tower are taken from
Damiette (
Damiate in Dutch) during the 5th
crusade by Haarlem knights and that since
1561 the two bells are rung every evening between 21:00 and 21:30 o'clock, to commemorate the conquest of Damiette on
August 25 1219. In reality, they were a gift by Johannes Dircks, a bell-maker from
Aalst to
Nicolaas van Nieuwland, the bishop of Haarlem.
In any case, the ringing of the bells indicated the closing of the city gates. Two new upper bells were placed in
1732, created by Jan Albert de Grave.
In
1932 the clock on the tower was upgraded with electrical lights.
Fires
On
May 22 1801 there was a fire caused by a thunderstrike in the tower. A disaster was prevented by Martijn Hendrik Kretschman, the guard of the tower, and three other men. In 1839, one of those men, Jan Drost, committed suicide in the tower after he was fired (he worked for the church). He had tried to set fire to the organ by throwing hot coals on top of it, but he missed and another disaster was prevented.
In the renovation of the 1930s an automatic sprinkler system was installed in the tower, that could extinguish a fire up to an elevation in the tower of 70 meters.
Organ
The
organ of the Sint-Bavo church (the
Christiaan Müller organ) is one of the world's great organs. It was built by Christian Müller and Jan van Logteren, from Amsterdam. They built it between
1735 and
1738; upon completion it was the largest organ in the world with 60 voices and 32-feet pedal-towers. In
Moby-Dick (
1851),
Herman Melville describes the inside of a whale's mouth:
» "Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes?"
Many famous people used this organ, including
Mendelssohn,
Händel and the 10-year old
Mozart who played it in 1766.
The organ was modified a number of times in the 19th and 20th century. These changes were undone in the renovation between
1959 and
1961. Between
1987 and
2000 work was performed on the voicing of the organ. A local story goes to say that the bass of the organ was so low, the mortar in between the brimestones started to brittle to nothing.
Image:Sint-Bavokerk Tower.JPG|The bell tower of the Sint-Bavokerk with the protestant rooster on top
Image:Berkheyde-Haarlem.png|The Grote Markt in 1696, painting by Gerrit Adriaenszoon Berckheyde
Further Information
Get more info on 'Sint-bavokerk'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://sint-bavokerk.totallyexplained.com">Sint-Bavokerk Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
