In the latest chapter of our lives, Lydia and I have packed up our all our worldly belongings, said goodbye to our dear friends in Australia and America and are beginning afresh in Belgium. What wonderful adventures await us in the Old World?
Leuven is packed full of odd little statues, partly because it has been an
important town for hundreds of years, a centre of learning and religion, and
partly because of the Mannen van het jaar, the "Men of the
Year". This is a friends' association unique to Leuven,
based around men who share a birth year. Each year has it own club with its own
emblem, flag and costume, which are displayed in the Town Hall. When each
circle turns 40 they start to organise activities, festivals or parades, one
each year until they turn 50, which they celebrate with a major event, such as
the unveiling of a new statue. The circle members are then called Abrahams and
have no further obligations to organise events.
With our beautiful blue sky for Valentine's Day, we walked around the city to
see a sample of the statues. There is Fiere Margriet (Proud Daisy), hovering
naked above a rock. There is the Kattenpomp, built in 1729 to illustrate a
traditional folk song:
“Twee
emmerkes water halen,
Twee
emmerkes pompen,
De
meisjes met hun klompen
De
meisjes van de kattestraat…”
A crude
translation doesn't seem to make any sense, but it is a folk song after
all.
Proud Daisy
“Two
buckets of water,
Two
bucket pumps,
The
girls with their wooden shoes
The
girls of Cat Street…”
Just outside an apartment block on Brusselstraat is a small statue "De
Koeieschieter" (the Cowshooters). The citizens of different towns around
Flanders all have a nickname, and for Leuven
they are called "Cowshooters". This is because of an event during the
siege of 1691, when the Leuven militia heard
footsteps in fog and bravely set up a formation to battle the approaching
French army, who just turned out to be a herd of cattle. There is a statue to
Paep Thoon, a jester at the Church in the 15th century, one to Erasmus
(1467-1536), the famous scholar, reformer and a lecturer at the University of
Leuven, and one to Edouard Remy, a 19th century industrialist who actually
cared about the condition of workers. Another statue, outside the Augustinian
convent on Brusselstraat is dedicated to Jozef de Veuster, who (as Father Damiaan)
went to Hawai'i
to look after lepers, insisting that their carers should live among the lepers
rather than keeping them at arms length. He died in 1889 from leprosy.
