Zuiderkerk

Every older church in Amsterdam was built for Catholic worship and converted. This was the first one the Protestant city designed for itself, and it had to work out what such a building should look like.

For twenty-five years after the city changed religion in 1578, Amsterdam’s Protestants simply used the churches they had taken over. Then the city outgrew them, and in 1603 it ordered a new one. Nobody had built a Protestant church here before.

The job went to Hendrick de Keyser, the city’s sculptor and architect. A Protestant service is about listening to a sermon, so he gave up the long processional plan of a Catholic church, with its altar at the far end, and made a broad, light hall where everyone could see and hear the pulpit. Then he added the thing the city really wanted: a tower to be seen from the harbour.

De Keyser was buried here in 1621. Rembrandt lived round the corner on the Jodenbreestraat, and three of his children, who all died as infants, were buried here too. In 1874 Claude Monet stood by the canal to the south and painted the tower.

Its darkest use came in the last winter of the Second World War. In the famine of 1944 and 1945, people in Amsterdam died faster than they could be buried, and the Zuiderkerk, by then no longer a church, was used as a temporary mortuary.