abqtoadam: Delft

As I may have noted on here before, there are many placed in the Netherlands that I have not seen. I've barely ventured outside of the Randstad, and I haven't made it to Rotterdam of Den Haag within the Randstad. Matt and Denise's visit provided an opportunity for me to make the time and effort to see somewhere new, since they wanted to take a few trips outside of Amsterdam during their visit. After weighing our options - some Northern towns that had open air museums describing traditional Dutch life, Rotterdam, Den Haag - we decided on Delft, which has been described to me as one of the most beautiful cities in the Netherlands.

Delft did not disappoint. It had one of the most beautiful city squares I've seen in Europe (and, well, the world), with a giant church and belfry situated opposite each other and cheese shops, cafes, and pottery vendors forming the other sides. The "New Church" (which is over 500 years old) included lots of information about the history of Delft, Holland, and the Netherlands, with special attention paid to William of Orange, who is entombed within the church along with other members of the royal family, the most recent being Queen Juliana in 2004. The history of William is fascinating - he was a wealthy nobleman who united the provinces that now form the Netherlands into a revolt against the Spanish, which led to the Eighty Years War between the Netherlands and Spain in the 16th Century. The war was related to conflicts between Spanish Catholicism and Dutch Protestantism, though I'm sure there were economic factors that were heavily involved. William was assassinated when he was 40. The Dutch apparently were (and still are) quite fond of William, and the murderer's fate was described in detail within the church (and reasonably replicated on Wikipedia):

He was tortured before his trial on 13 July, where he was sentenced to be brutally – even by the standards of that time – killed. The magistrates decreed that the right hand of Gérard should be burned off with a red-hot iron, that his flesh should be torn from his bones with pincers in six different places, that he should be quartered and disembowelled alive, that his heart should be torn from his bosom and flung in his face, and that, finally, his head should be cut off.