Zuiderkerk

Why is it significant?

Step into the little square around the church and tilt your head back at the tower: layer upon layer of white stone and wood, columns, clocks and a spire like a pepper pot stretched skywards. This is the Zuiderkerk, the South Church, and it was a revolution in brick and stone.

Key Facts

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Step into the little square around the church and tilt your head back at the tower: layer upon layer of white stone and wood, columns, clocks and a spire like a pepper pot stretched skywards. This is the Zuiderkerk, the South Church, and it was a revolution in brick and stone.

It was built between 1603 and 1611, and it was the first church in Amsterdam designed from scratch for Protestant worship. Since the city turned Protestant in 1578, the Reformed congregation had been making do with old Catholic churches, stripped of their altars and images. This was something new: a church built around the pulpit and the spoken word, with no saints in the windows. The architect was Hendrick de Keyser, the man who crowned the Mint Tower, and when he died in 1621, he was buried inside.

For a few years in the 1630s and 1640s, Rembrandt and his wife Saskia lived just around the corner. Several of their children were brought here to be baptised, and the parish knew their grief, because one after another, the babies died in infancy. Only their son Titus lived to grow up. Saskia herself died in 1642, the year Rembrandt delivered the Night Watch.

Painters loved this tower. Claude Monet painted it from the Groenburgwal, as you just saw, and long before him it appeared in countless views and prints of the city. De Keyser's mix of red brick and pale stone became the signature look of Amsterdam in its Golden Age.

There is a darker chapter too. In the Hunger Winter of 1944 and 1945, when western Holland was cut off and starving under German occupation, the church served as a temporary morgue for people who had died of hunger and cold. The church had already stopped holding services in 1929, and today it is used for events. Walk out through the gateway onto Sint Antoniesbreestraat. Across the street you will notice a pale Italian-style facade among the brick gables: the Pintohuis, bought in 1651 by a Sephardic merchant family and saved by protesting residents in the 1970s. Turn right, towards the little bridge, and stop at the red-shuttered house on the corner.