Westerkerk

Rembrandt is buried somewhere under this floor, and nobody knows where. The most famous painter in the city died broke, and was put in a rented grave with no name on it.

When the city dug its great ring of canals in the 1610s, it needed churches for the new districts. This was the grand one, for the merchants moving into the houses along the water. Hendrick de Keyser designed it and died a year after work began, so his son finished it.

The tower came last. It is about 87 metres tall, the highest church tower in Amsterdam, and at the top is a crown. The Habsburg emperor Maximilian had granted the city the right to put his imperial crown above its coat of arms, and Amsterdam, by then a Protestant republic that had thrown off Habsburg rule, kept the crown anyway. It was too good an advertisement to give up.

Rembrandt spent his last years a few streets away in the Jordaan, after his bankruptcy. When he died in 1669 he was buried here in a grave the church rented out. Such graves were cleared after some years to make room, and his remains were lost.

A stone’s throw up the canal, at number 263, a girl in hiding could see this tower from an attic window. Anne Frank wrote in her diary that she found the sound of its bells reassuring, especially at night.