Medieval Amsterdam & Oudezijds: Sailors, Canals & Hidden Churches
Discover the 800-year-old origins of Amsterdam, from the Dam dyke to clandestine attic sanctuaries and weighing gates
Amsterdam · 7 stops · 12 min audio · Generated
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1. Dam Square & The Royal Palace: Built on Thirteen Thousand Trees
Dam, 1012 JS Amsterdam
Stand right here in the open expanse of Dam Square and look across at the classical sandstone facade of the Royal Palace. You are standing on the literal birthplace of the city. Around the year twelve seventy, local fishermen built a wooden dam across the mouth of the River Amstel to keep the salty waters of the Zuiderzee from flooding their modest peat-bog settlement, giving birth to the name Amstel-redamme, which evolved into Amsterdam.
How does this monumental palace stay upright on a muddy quagmire? The engineering secret lies completely underground. When architect Jacob van Campen designed the building in sixteen forty-eight as the new Town Hall during the Golden Age, master builders drove exactly thirteen thousand six hundred and fifty-nine Norway spruce timber piles deep into the saturated marshland to strike firm sand.
Dutch schoolchildren still memorize that number with an old rhyme: three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, put a one in front and a nine at the end! Crowned by the bronze figure of Atlas carrying the celestial globe on his shoulders, it was hailed as the Eighth Wonder of the World, celebrating an empire whose merchant fleet was larger than all other European navies combined.
In eighteen zero-eight, Napoleon's brother Louis Bonaparte took over the building, transforming the democratic city hall into a royal palace. Today, as trams ring past and street musicians play, Dam Square remains the historic anchor of Dutch freedom.
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2. Oude Kerk: The Sailors' Church and Rembrandt's Saskia
Oudekerksplein 23, 1012 GX Amsterdam
Look up at the towering timber-vaulted roof and delicate spire of the Oude Kerk rising right in the center of the Red Light District. Consecrated in thirteen zero-six and dedicated to Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, this is the oldest standing building in all of Amsterdam. For centuries, ocean-going sailors climbed down from their wooden caravels and knelt on these stones to pray for survival before sailing into stormy Arctic waters or around the Cape of Good Hope.
Look down at the floor beneath your boots: the entire floor is composed of two thousand five hundred weathered grey gravestones. Over ten thousand citizens lie buried beneath this stone pavement, including famous admirals, merchant governors, and composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck.
Near the choir lies grave number twenty-nine, the resting place of Saskia van Uylenburgh, the beloved wife and muse of painter Rembrandt van Rijn. Rembrandt married Saskia in sixteen thirty-four and painted her radiantly in countless masterpieces, but she died of tuberculosis at just twenty-nine years old, leaving Rembrandt heartbroken and penniless.
In fifteen seventy-eight, during the Protestant Alteratie, Calvinists stripped the church of its Catholic golden statues, leaving the massive oak barrel-vaulted ceiling looking like an inverted wooden ship hull. The juxtaposition of this solemn medieval sanctuary surrounded by glowing neon windows is quintessential Amsterdam.
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3. Our Lord in the Attic: The Secret Catholic Sanctuary
Oudezijds Voorburgwal 38-40, 1012 GD Amsterdam
Notice this handsome seventeenth-century brick canal house at Oudezijds Voorburgwal thirty-eight with its stepped gable and stone quayside. To passersby and Protestant city magistrates, this looked like the private townhouse of wealthy Catholic merchant Jan Hartman. But climbing the narrow spiraling timber staircase reveals one of the most astonishing religious secrets in Europe: Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder, or Our Lord in the Attic.
Why did Catholics have to hide in an attic? After the Dutch Revolt of fifteen seventy-eight, public Catholic worship was strictly outlawed by Calvinist authorities. However, practical Amsterdam magistrates adopted a pragmatic policy of gedogen, or pragmatic toleration: Catholics were allowed to practice their faith, provided they did so behind closed doors where no one on the canal could see or hear them.
In sixteen sixty-one, Hartman knocked out the ceiling joists across the top three floors of his canal house and two adjoining properties, creating a hidden two-hundred-seat baroque church suspended in the rafters. Complete with a pink-painted marble-effect altar, gallery balconies, and a working pipe organ, it was an entire cathedral in the roof!
Step up into the narrow wooden galleries: looking out through small attic windows over the rooftops of Amsterdam, you can feel the remarkable blend of stubborn faith and mercantile pragmatism that defined early modern Dutch society.
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4. Zeedijk & The Sailors' Wall: Sea Dike and Chinatown
Zeedijk, 1012 AX Amsterdam
Walk along the curved, winding cobbles of the Zeedijk and notice how the street bends while surrounding canals run straight. You are walking along the top of an ancient medieval sea dyke, built in the thirteenth century to protect the early settlement from the vicious tidal surges of the Zuiderzee. Because it followed the natural coastline of the river mouth, it retains its twisting medieval curve.
What was life like along the Zeedijk in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Located right at the harbour mouth, this street was the notorious first stop for merchant sailors who had spent three years at sea with the Dutch East India Company. The street was packed with tavern keepers, money changers, and boarding houses waiting to relieve sailors of their wages.
Look at the timber-fronted house at number one: In 't Aepjen, or In the Monkeys. Dating from fifteen fifty, it is one of only two surviving wooden-faced houses in all of Amsterdam. Penniless sailors returning from Indonesia often paid off their tavern bills by giving the barman live monkeys! The tavern became infested with fleas from the monkeys, giving rise to the famous Dutch saying: You are staying at In the Monkeys, meaning you have landed yourself in deep trouble.
In the twentieth century, Chinese sailors settled here, establishing Europe's oldest Chinatown. Today, dragon lanterns hang alongside medieval gables in a melting pot of nautical trade and Asian spice.
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5. De Waag: The 1488 Gatehouse and Rembrandt's Anatomy
Nieuwmarkt 4, 1012 CR Amsterdam
Gaze up at the five fairytale brick turrets and conical tiled roofs of De Waag, standing squarely in the middle of Nieuwmarkt. Built in fourteen eighty-eight as the Sint Antoniespoort, this is the oldest surviving non-religious building in Amsterdam and the sole remaining gatehouse of the medieval defensive city wall that once ringed the settlement.
When Amsterdam expanded rapidly in the seventeenth century and demolished its old defensive walls, what saved this fortress? In sixteen seventeen, city authorities drained the surrounding moat and converted the gate into a public weighing house, or Waag, where goods over fifty pounds like cheese, tobacco, and cannonballs were officially weighed for tax levies.
The upper towers were rented out to influential trade guilds, including blacksmiths, masons, and the Guild of Surgeons. In the octagonal central tower, the surgeons established an anatomical theater. Here, in sixteen thirty-two, doctor Nicolaes Tulp performed a public dissection on the corpse of executed criminal Aris Kindt, immortalized by a twenty-six-year-old Rembrandt in his breakthrough masterpiece, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.
During the Nazi occupation of nineteen forty-one, the surrounding Nieuwmarkt square was surrounded by barbed wire by the Gestapo as a assembly point for deporting thousands of Dutch Jewish citizens. Today, candlelit outdoor cafes wrap around these brick towers, holding five centuries of triumph and sorrow.
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6. Trippenhuis: The Cannon Merchants' Canal Palace
Kloveniersburgwal 29, 1011 JV Amsterdam
Look across the Kloveniersburgwal canal at that colossal classical stone mansion with eight Corinthian pilasters: the Trippenhuis. Built in sixteen sixty-two by architect Justus Vingboons for wealthy brothers Louys and Hendrick Trip, this is the widest canal residence in all of Amsterdam, measuring twenty-two meters across.
How did the Trip brothers amass the colossal fortune required to build a private palace of solid German sandstone while other residents built in modest red brick? They were international arms merchants. During the Thirty Years' War, the Trip family controlled iron mines and foundries in Sweden, manufacturing thousands of cast-iron cannons, muskets, and tons of gunpowder sold to all sides of the European conflict.
Look up at the rooftop chimneys framing the roof: they are not ordinary brick stacks. Vingboons sculpted the stone chimneys to look like upright mortar cannons pointing into the sky, proudly announcing the deadly trade that paid for the mansion! Across the canal at number twenty-six sits the Little Trippenhuis, measuring just two meters wide: legend says the Trip brothers' coachman remarked that he would be content with a house as wide as his masters' front door, and his amused employer built him one to size!
For over seventy years in the nineteenth century, the Trippenhuis served as the first home of the Rijksmuseum, displaying Rembrandt's Night Watch before its transfer to Museumplein. Today, it houses the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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7. Oudemanhuispoort: Van Gogh's Secondhand Book Passage
Oudemanhuispoort, 1012 CN Amsterdam
Step through the carved stone archway of the Oudemanhuispoort and walk down this quiet, gaslit covered passage lined with weathered wooden book cases. Dating back to sixteen zero-one, this passageway was originally built as the entrance to the Oude Manhuis, a municipal almshouse for elderly men financed by lotteries and the city council.
Since seventeen thirty-three, the city permitted street traders and bookbinders to set up stalls along the walls of this covered gallery. It has operated as a secondhand book market continuously for nearly three centuries, making it one of the oldest active literary markets on the European continent.
In eighteen seventy-seven, a struggling twenty-four-year-old aspiring artist named Vincent van Gogh lived in Amsterdam while studying theology. In letters to his brother Theo, Vincent described how he walked through this exact passage almost every single day, thumbing through cheap prints by Rembrandt and seventeenth-century woodcuts that shaped his raw artistic eye.
Step through the inner door into the secluded courtyard: the former almshouse now serves as the main faculty building of the University of Amsterdam. As students cycle through the passage with armfuls of books, the scent of old paper under these historic vaults links modern university life with four hundred years of learning.