Stinking Rich

Het Grote Kerk, Haarlem

In Haarlem—one of my favorite places in the Netherlands—stands the massive St. Bavo Church, except no one calls it that. When the original structure was destroyed by fire in 1328, the church was rebuilt between 1390 and 1540. According to my tour book, the Catholic church was named after a local nobleman who was known to have frequented the Red Light District in his youth. (The details of his conversion include leaving a castle to live in a hollow tree. Go figure…I guess there is hope.) In the later 1500’s, Protestants claimed the church and removed all Catholic icons and adornments (including whitewashing the frescos). It has been known as the Grote Kerk (the Great Church) ever since.

The pipe organ

The Grote Kerk is home to a true national treasure—one the largest and most impressive pipe organs in the world. It is truly renowned. Even Herman Melville referenced the organ in the Grote Kerk in Moby Dick. To describe the bones in the whale’s mouth, he wrote: Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes? The list of people who used this organ includes Mendelssohn, Handel and the ten-year old Mozart who played it in 1766. Still used today for concerts and special events, the organ has been tenderly cared for over the years. The latest refurbishment lasted thirteen years, 1987—2000.

Of particular interest to me was the floor of the cathedral. As the center of life in Haarlem, the Grote Kerk served as everything from refuge during seige to bad weather marketplace to cemetery for the well to do. The floor attests to the latter. It is a patchwork-quilt of black marble, each piece marking the grave of someone who undoubtedly could afford such privilege—among them such notables as Pieter Teyler and Frans Hals. (Teyler, amassed an amazing fortune estimated at a modern-day value of 80 million euros! A science buff, when died in 1778, he left his entire fortune as the trust fund for the museum that still boasts his name. It is reported that his fortune was exhausted in the 1980’s after which the Dutch government assumed operation of the museum. Hals was the greatest Dutch painter of the Golden Age.) 

The author and world traveler, Rick Steves wrote this about the thousands of graves in the Grote Kerk:

Only those with piles of money to give to the church could be buried in a way that gave them an advantage in the salvation derby. But even though the dead bodies were embalmed, they stunk. Imagine being a peasant sitting here, trying to think about God…and thinking only of the stench of the well-fed bodies below. Here is where the phrase “stinking rich” was born.