The Noord/Zuidlijn (North-South line) in Amsterdam is finally scheduled to open on 22 July after more than a decade of delays. And while digging, a whole bunch of objects were found, from coins and tools to jewellery and household objects from various eras. Interestingly enough as I write this, there’s no Wikipedia entry in English about line 52, its official name.
An entire chapter of the Below the Surface report, which catalogues the archaeological finds of the Damrak and Rokin streets, says that “besides their different datings, the two locations show the same pattern between 1600 and 1900, with a similar (slight) peak around 1650-1725 and 1800-1875.” As well, both locations had very different types of finds, so click the link below and have a good read and look at all the things that were found.
According to Bright.nl, the Bonami game console museum in Zwolle has received 200 items in one go for its collection, the biggest extension in the museum’s history. The items are said to be from the 1980s or earlier. All I can think about now is my very first Atari Super Pong for the mid 1970s.
The museum, started by Naomi and John Groenewold, also showcases many Philips products, such as the mini-cassette and the Philips ADM-3A, one of the first video display terminals used to operate a computer without a display.
There are many Dutch games, computers that use punch cards and newer items with VR, which means there’s something for everyone. And yes, you can apparently try out all kinds of games.
At lunch, before stepping into a plane back to the Netherlands from Canada, I was told about the story of Léo Major, a French Canadian soldier of the Royal 22nd Regiment of the Canadian Armed Forces who single-handedly freed the Dutch city of Zwolle, and other places, with some unbelievable tactics.
Léo Major of Longueuil, Québec was a corporal who refused to move up in rank despite his brilliant moves. He pulled off stuff without consulting his superiors and made bluffs work that nobody else would have come up with. He pretty much freelanced and the army just let him because he was brave and smart.
During WWII, Zwolle, Overijssel was surrounded by German troops and the 22nd Regiment that was trying to recapture it were failing miserably, losing dozens of soldiers every day. Léo Major and his best friend Wilfrid Arseneault volunteered to go and find out where the Germans were positioned to try and improve their situation.
At nightfall the pair went to the farm of the Van Gerner family who tried to explain in Dutch that the forest was full of Germans. Shortly after, Arseneault was shot, his stomach full of bullet holes, as explained by Major himself in the video below. Major, determined to complete the mission left his best friend behind and pressed on.
Major entered Zwolle and attacked German patrols and ran through the streets throwing grenades to convince the enemy that Canadian troops were marching in, and it worked. He captured entire troops of 8-10 Germans who let themselves be delivered to the 22nd Regiment outside the city, believing the city was under attack. Major kept going back to Zwolle to pull the same tactic over and over. He even set fire to Gestapo headquarters.
At dawn, he realised that the last German troops had left the city and that Zwolle was free. After making sure the city knew they were liberated, Major went to pick up the corpse of his friend that he brought to the Van Gerner farm for safe keeping until the burial. Later that morning, Canadian troops marched into the city and the residents of Zwolle finally saw that they were liberated.
Léo Major was given his first medal, the Distinguished Conduct Medal of the British Army, the only Canadian and one of only three soldiers in the British Commonwealth to ever receive the Distinguished Conduct Medal twice in separate wars. Major went on to pull some more great moves in the Korean War. His friend Wilfrid Arseneault was given a Bronze Lion posthumously in 1970 by Queen Juliana.
This YouTube video features Léo Major himself in English on Zwolle television, with parts translated into Dutch.
As of today, everybody online can access and search the Surinamese slave registries of the Dutch National Archives, in Dutch.
Started in summer 2017, it took 700 volunteers many months to digitise the entries about 80,000 slaves registered between 1830 and 1863, after which slavery was abolished. Slave owners were obliged to register the details of the slaves in their possession: details such as date of birth, the mother’s name, release or sale, if they had leprosy, and other matters that were important for determining their worth. This project was carried out as a collaboration between the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and the Anton de Kom University of Surinam and financed thanks to donors.
One of the difficulties in searching the archive even today is that back then, slaves could not have last names. Their proper last name can be found on emancipation documents of 1863 and put together, many people can track the history of their ancestors.
While cleaning up the book attic of the Dutch Parliament to get ready for a big move in the near future, hundreds of priceless books have been discovered, including a first edition of Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith’s ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ aka ‘The Wealth of Nations’ worth a few hundred thousand euro, published in 1776. Although it is said not to be that rare, it is very much in demand by rich folks as a showpiece in their offices.
Among the hundreds of books published before 1830, 10 percent of them are unique, with no existing second edition. The rest of the books are mostly from the second half of the eighteenth century. Many of the books will need to be restored and will possibly be exhibited at some point in time.
Using digital technology, Dutch researchers have deciphered the writing on two pages of Anne Frank’s diary, which have ‘naughty jokes, candid explanation of sex, contraception and prostitution’. The pages were pasted over with brown masking paper and remained a mystery for decades.
Experts claim that these new bits reveal more about Anne’s development as a writer than it does about her interest in sex. Other known passages about her coming of age and her body were censored by her father Otto before the diary was first published in 1947, but were eventually included in subsequent publications.
On prostitution, Anne wrote: “All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together. In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there.”
Celebrating its own bizarre fifth year anniversary this year, the ‘mistaken tourists’ (‘vergistoeristen’, in Dutch, a contender for the best word of the year 2018 in my view), are people who still show up in Amsterdam on 30 April on what used to be Queen’s Day, The Netherlands’ national holiday, dressed in orange garb and wondering where the party is.
In 2014 Queen’s Day was renamed King’s Day and moved to King Willem-Alexander’s actual birthday, 27 April, except if that day falls on a Sunday, then it’s on 26 April. The culprits seems to be outdated guide books and sites, holding on tight to Queen’s Day on 30 April and in doing so, pissing off a lot of tourists and giving us a chance to admire their editorial skills.
However, why would tourists and even websites have any reason to think a national holiday has moved back three days and can move around a bit more if 27 April falls on a Sunday? I wonder how many more years this will last, although I wonder if we’ll make it to a tenth year anniversary. Maybe then we should actually throw a party for the tourists.
New images of Rotterdam during WWII have surfaced, filmed by a Mr Jurlings. They show places such as the Port of Rotterdam (today’s biggest European port) and the ‘White House’, a beautiful 1989 Art Nouveau building that survived the bombing of the city and also Europe’s first skyscraper at that time. The film will be turned into a documentary by filmmaker Joop de Jong, which will be presented in the Museum Rotterdam in the fall.
Many people are quick to say that Rotterdam isn’t as pretty as Amsterdam, which has an intact city centre, and that will never be a fair comparison. Rotterdam was bombed flat and almost entirely rebuilt with the exception of a handful of buildings. Today, it has many new buildings that have become symbols of the city. There’s also a reason that the unofficial city motto ‘is niet lullen maar poesten’ or ‘geen woorden maar daden’ (‘stop blabbing and start cleaning’ or ‘not words, but deeds’.
The ‘hunger winter’ of 1944 as it is called here was a time when all the cities of the western Netherlands went hungry during a famine the country had never experienced before. An estimated 18,000 to 22,000 people died because of the famine, mostly elderly men.
In The Hague, paediatrician Willem Karel Dicke noticed that the children in his care with celiac disease were improving, as they were starving. At that time, doctors had known about celiac for years, but there was no consensus on its cause or how to treat it. Today, celiac disease is known to be a genetic autoimmune disorder.
In the 1930s Dicke had suspected that wheat was the main celiac offender, although the recommendation at the time was eating bananas rather than eliminating wheat. When the famine hit, people ate anything they could find, including ground up tulip bulbs which had next to no nutritional value, and contain glycoside, which can be poisonous. What Dicke noticed though was that starving children with celiac deteriorated less quickly. And once wheat products were available again, the children would get sick. The mortality rate of children in the Netherlands with celiac fell during the food shortage from 35 percent to nearly zero.
Once wartime was over and food was more readily available, children began suffering from celiac disease. Dicke then conducted years of research to prove and record what he had observed during the war. “In 1948, using five test subjects, Dicke provided different cereals for them to eat, carefully measuring patient weight and examining feces for fat absorption. In 1950, Dicke published his findings that wheat and rye flour aggravated celiac symptoms. Importantly, he also gave the children wheat starch to no ill effect, discounting the theory that complex carbohydrates were the cause, another working theory at that time. With the help of other colleagues, he later pinpointed gluten as the ultimate culprit.”
Dicke was almost awarded a greater honour: the Nobel Prize for Medicine, but when he died at age 57 and unfortunately Nobel Prizes are are not awarded posthumously.
(Link: atlasobscura.com, Photo: the Maria Christina neighbourhood in Heerlen, Limburg, built by Hitler)
Since the BBC has decided to talk about it, and many people have never heard of it, let’s tell you about the Royal Eise Eisinga Planetarium, the world’s oldest working planetarium or orrery, located in Franeker, Friesland.
Built from 1774 to 1781 by Eise Eisinga, it is a national monument, a “Baroque theatre for stargazers, crowning the living room of a modest wool comber who lived shortly after the Dutch Golden Age and an unfathomable undertaking considering Eisinga quit school aged 12”. Not only did the project take seven years to complete, but it nearly bankrupt him as well.
The amateur astronomer captured the universe in his living room, and the science behind it is still precise today. It is a working model of the solar system accurate for the time it was made, although Uranus, Neptune and Pluto (today a dwarf planet) are missing, as they hadn’t been discovered back then.
The film below is in Frisian and some commentary is in Dutch. You can see the old and new parts of the planetarium, as they eventually expanded having bought up neighbouring houses.
At lunch, before stepping into a plane back to the Netherlands from Canada, I was told about the story of Léo Major, a French Canadian soldier of the Royal 22nd Regiment of the Canadian Armed Forces who single-handedly freed the Dutch city of Zwolle, and other places, with some unbelievable tactics.
#/media/File:Bijenkorf_Rotterdam_1935.jpg){kind=link}
