Begijnhof

Historic · Centrum (Spui)Amsterdam,Netherlands

A walled Amsterdam courtyard of almshouses around a lawn, founded for lay religious women, still lived in and holding a timber house of about 1528.

The Begijnhof is a walled courtyard of houses around a lawn, reached through an unmarked archway off the Spui, and the drop in noise as you go through is immediate. People live in the houses — they are almshouses for single women — which is why the gate asks for quiet. Two churches face each other across the grass, and in one corner stands Het Houten Huys, timber-fronted and dated by tree rings to about 1528. The courtyard was founded for the Beguines: women who lived a religious life in common without becoming nuns — no vows, own property kept, free to leave and marry. They ran the place for six hundred years, and the last of them died in 1971. Their medieval chapel was taken away at the Reformation and handed to English-speaking Protestants in 1607, who have it still. Look directly opposite and you find the answer to that. The parish priest turned two ordinary houses into a Catholic chapel the community was not permitted to have, with a plain domestic door and a rich interior behind it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

People live here — the gate is open only from ten to six, voices carry off the walls, and photographing into the windows is the one thing residents genuinely mind.
Mondrian is on the pulpit — a young Piet Mondrian designed the carved panels on the pulpit of the English church here in 1898, long before the grids he became known for.
Early or late, never midday — the courtyard is two minutes from the busiest shopping street in the city, and the whole effect depends on it being quiet.

Things to do

1
Stand still on the lawn for two minutes
Come in from the Spui, walk to the middle of the grass and stop. The traffic noise is gone, the sound is birds and somebody's radio through a window, and you are about seventy metres from one of the busiest shopping streets in the Netherlands.
2
Find the door that hides a church
Opposite the brick English church, on the west side, is a doorway that looks like the entrance to two ordinary houses. It opens into a full Catholic chapel with an altar and galleries, built to be invisible from the street and still arranged that way.
3
Look at number 34
The house at the edge of the lawn is one of only two timber-fronted houses left in Amsterdam, and was long called the oldest house in the city. Tree-ring work in 2010 dated its wood to 1528, which quietly killed the older story that it went up straight after the great fire of 1452. Stand square to it: the ground floor is one shopfront's width of dark painted planks, and everything on either side of it is brick.