Noordermarkt: Monday Junk, Saturday Farmers
Why is it significant?
Walk into the square and let the church slide to the edge of your vision for a moment, because today the star is the ground around it. Cobbles, plane trees, café terraces, and, if your timing is lucky, a crush of market stalls. This is the Noordermarkt, the living room of the Jordaan.
Key Facts
| Place | Noordermarkt: Monday Junk, Saturday Farmers |
|---|---|
| Address | Noordermarkt, 1015 MV Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.37960, 4.88610 |
| Part of Walk | Behind the Green Doors: Hidden Hofjes and Market Days of the Jordaan, Amsterdam |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the square and let the church slide to the edge of your vision for a moment, because today the star is the ground around it. Cobbles, plane trees, café terraces, and, if your timing is lucky, a crush of market stalls. This is the Noordermarkt, the living room of the Jordaan.
It works in two shifts. On Monday mornings, it becomes a flea market: old records, chipped Delft plates, wool coats, vintage lamps, boxes of mysterious keys. Locals arrive early, before the light is properly up, because the best things go first. On Saturdays the square turns respectable and green, with a farmers' market of organic bread, cheeses, mushrooms and apple juice, a tradition that began in the 1980s and now draws people from all over the city.
Markets here are much older than that. The Noorderkerk, designed by Hendrick de Keyser in the shape of a Greek cross, was built in the 1620s for the people of this new working-class district, and trade soon gathered at its feet. Buying and selling on this square is a habit that goes back centuries, long before anyone called it vintage.
And this square has a political memory too. On the twenty-fourth of February 1941, days after the German occupiers had rounded up hundreds of young Jewish men in the Jewish quarter, an open-air meeting was held here on the Noordermarkt. The call went out for a general strike. The next morning trams stopped, shipyards fell silent, and Amsterdam staged the first mass protest against the persecution of the Jews anywhere in occupied Europe.
So when you buy a cracked teacup here on a Monday, you are standing where ordinary people once decided to risk everything for their neighbours. Now walk west along the wide Westerstraat, the street that runs straight out of the square.