Our Lord in the Attic

Museum · De Wallen (Centrum)Amsterdam,Netherlands

An Amsterdam canal house whose upper floors are hollowed into a hidden Catholic church from the years the city tolerated what it banned.

Our Lord in the Attic is a complete Catholic church — altar, organ, two hanging galleries — built into the roof of an ordinary canal house. From the pavement there is nothing to see. You reach it by climbing through the house itself: front room, back room, kitchen, bedstead, a narrow stair, and then the ceiling opens into a church two storeys high with galleries hung off the walls. It seated about a hundred and fifty people. None of it was built as a church. A merchant named Jan Hartman knocked together the attics of this house and the two small ones behind it, then had a church fitted out in the space. A priest was living in it within a year. Look for the two tricks that a room this tight forced on its builders. The altarpiece, a Baptism of Christ painted by Jacob de Wit in 1716, slides out of its frame so that other paintings can take the slot as the church year turns. The pulpit is not there at all until someone unfolds it out of the base of a column, because there was no floor to give it. The organ above you dates from 1794 and is still played.

Worth knowing

HistoryA Catholic from Coesfeld

The man behind it was a Catholic from Coesfeld in Germany. Jan Hartman bought the canal house and the two behind it on 10 May 1661.

Good to know

Expect stairs and nothing but stairs — the route runs on seventeenth-century canal-house staircases, steep and narrow, with no lift anywhere, so the museum is effectively closed to wheelchair users and hard on bad knees.
Take the domestic rooms slowly — most of the building is somebody’s home, and the church at the top only makes its impression if you have the scale of an ordinary house in your head.
Aim for the opening hour or the last part of the day — the stairs and the attic are narrow enough that one group fills them completely, and there is no way to step round anybody.
You go in at one house and out of another — the entrance is the modern building at Oudezijds Voorburgwal 38 and the exit is number 40, so the old front has no visitor door.
This was never the only one — the city held a string of clandestine churches and others survive elsewhere, so what is unusual here is that organ, galleries and altar all stayed.

Things to do

1
Look at the house front from the far bank
Before going in, cross to the other side of Oudezijds Voorburgwal and look at number 40. Compare it with the houses either side: same width, same brick, same rhythm of windows, nothing at all above the door. Everything you are about to walk through sits behind that front, three floors up.
2
Climb through the house until the ceiling opens up
Go up through the living rooms without skipping them, so that a normal house is fixed in your mind. At the top of the last stair the ceiling opens two storeys and the galleries appear along both walls. That jump in volume is the effect the whole building was made to produce, and it only works from below.