Oude Kerk

Everything around you is younger than this church. When it was consecrated, Amsterdam was a small fishing settlement behind a dike.

The Oude Kerk was consecrated in 1306 and dedicated to Saint Nicholas, patron of sailors, which tells you who was paying for it. This was a harbour church. The water of the IJ was a short walk north, and the men who prayed here made their living on it.

It was never finished so much as added to. For two and a half centuries, every time the town grew richer, a guild or a wealthy family paid for another chapel, and the building pushed outwards until it filled its square. That is why it looks lopsided from every angle: you are looking at one building campaign after another, stuck together.

In 1566 a crowd came through the doors and broke nearly every image inside. Twelve years later the city turned Protestant, the altars went, and the church became the town's living room. People met here to do business, beggars slept here, and Rembrandt came here to register his intention to marry Saskia. She was buried under the floor in 1642, the year he finished The Night Watch.

That floor is made entirely of gravestones, more than two thousand of them, with generations of Amsterdammers beneath. And outside, the church's oldest neighbours carry on as they have since the harbour days: the red-light district grew up here because this is where the sailors came ashore.