Oude Kerk

Church · De Wallen (Centrum)Amsterdam,Netherlands

Amsterdam's oldest building, its floor made of two thousand gravestones over sixty thousand burials, its medieval oak vault stripped bare at the Reformation.

The Oude Kerk is the oldest building in Amsterdam, and its floor is made of more than two thousand gravestones laid flat. Around sixty thousand people were buried under it before the city closed the church to burials in 1865, and Rembrandt's wife Saskia lies under one stone in a side chapel. Inside, the church is bright and largely empty, with a barrel vault of oak overhead that has been in place since about 1390. The church was consecrated in 1306, changed religion once, and never quite got over it. Guilds and wealthy families bought side chapels and bolted them onto it, so the plan sprawls. Then the city changed sides in the Dutch Revolt, and the Protestants stripped out the altars and the statues and painted the vaults grey. Look up, because that grey is the reason anything survived: the medieval painting under it came through, and was uncovered in 1951. Services are still held on Sunday mornings. The rest of the week the church commissions new art, so one large installation usually fills the nave for months and the inside changes from one year to the next.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look under the hinged seats in the choir stalls — the carved brackets beneath them were cut around 1500 and run to jokes rather than saints, including a man defecating coins.
Come in the middle of a bright day — most windows are clear glass, so the painted panels on the wooden ceiling only show up against the grey paint when real daylight reaches the nave.
Settle the tower question before you buy — it costs extra, opens roughly spring to autumn only, is climbed with a guide, and runs to 155 narrow steps.
Find out what is in the nave first — the church commissions one large work at a time, so you may walk into a construction or a sound piece rather than a bare interior.
Stay if the organ is playing — the Vater-Müller instrument of 1726 stands at the west end, and the wooden ceiling throws its sound back down the nave instead of swallowing it.

Things to do

1
Stand under the nave and tip your head back
Pick a spot in the middle of the nave and look straight up. The oak planking above you was cut and laid in the 1390s and has never been replaced. Where the grey paint was taken off, figures and guild emblems are still legible on individual boards.
2
Read the carvings hidden in the choir stalls
Go behind the choir screen to the two rows of stalls, fifteen seats on the north side and twenty-one on the south. The seats fold up, and a small carved bracket sits under each one. They were cut around 1500, and the Reformation that stripped the church of its altars and statues left these carvings in place.
3
Climb the tower and read the medieval street plan
Take the guided climb on a clear afternoon between spring and autumn. It runs to 155 steps and goes up in small groups. From the top you are level with the tiled roofs of the oldest quarter in the city, and the medieval street plan is easy to make out: short blocks, narrow alleys, and the church filling the middle.