Take a moment to look at the grand building on your right, the Provincial Court. Its soaring stone arches and statues are certainly beautiful to look at. But I want you to look past those elegant walls and envision the sheer, towering giant that commanded this exact spot for five hundred years.
Remember the Reie River we talked about earlier? The watery lifeblood that brought the world to this city? Well, the people of Bruges literally swallowed that river whole. Right where you are standing, they built a colossal, ninety-five-meter-long covered harbor directly over the flowing water.
Driven by an absolute hunger for dominance in global trade, the city constructed this massive structure to control the flow of all riches entering the region. This was the Waterhalle, finished in twelve ninety-four, a towering vault of stone and thick oak where ships from places like Venice and Genoa could sail straight inside to unload their treasures, perfectly sheltered. By forcing every single trade vessel to dock and pay taxes in this massive, dry warehouse, Bruges cemented its iron grip on the world's wealth.
Think of the overwhelming atmosphere inside that vast cavern. Picture the heavy, damp air smelling of wet wool, exotic spices, and river mud. You would hear the deafening echoes of shouting merchants and the heavy groans of massive wooden cranes. These cranes were powered by the crane children, men who literally walked inside giant wooden wheels like hamsters to hoist heavy cargo up to the massive attics. The walls were up to a meter and a half thick, built from massive bricks and resting on giant stone pillars planted directly into the dark riverbed. The structure was incredibly grand, measuring twenty-four meters wide and soaring about thirty meters high into the sky.
But forcing a river indoors comes with a heavy price. The constant, rising dampness from the water gnawed relentlessly at the thick wooden beams holding up the roof. For centuries, worried carpenters and stonemasons desperately warned the city that the great hall was rotting from the inside out and might collapse entirely. Eventually, the river traffic slowed down as the waters choked with sand and trade moved to other ports. Finally, in seventeen eighty-seven, the Austrian Emperor Joseph the Second ordered the majestic hall to be demolished. The locals protested bitterly, forced to watch the proud symbol of their golden age vanish piece by piece from the city skyline. Some of those ancient, massive pillars survived and can still be found today quietly resting in a nearby courtyard.
A completely new, classicist building replaced it, filled with grand meeting spaces and lively cafes. But then, in eighteen seventy-eight, a devastating fire broke out. The replacement building went up in violent flames. Bizarrely, some local art lovers actually cheered as it burned to the ground. They despised the newer architecture and saw the ashes as a perfect excuse to build the neo-Gothic palace standing before you right now. Neo-Gothic simply means a much later nineteenth-century revival of those soaring, pointed arches and dramatic details popular in the distant Middle Ages.
Now, let us keep moving. We are heading to the site of Saint Christopher's Church, which is just a short, two-minute walk away. As we walk, we are going to dive right back into the bloody aftermath of the Count's murder, exploring the absolute chaos that erupted across these very cobblestones the moment he took his final breath.
