Whenever leaving Amsterdam for a long spell—and I’ve just left for at least two months—I find it good soul practice to take a last look at the Westerkerk.
Most famous for standing right next to where Anne Frank wrote her diary, the Wester guards what was always, pre-Covid anyway, the longest queue in town. Folks from around the world pay homage to a hideout euphemistically called a house and make that Amsterdam’s number one “attraction.”
Hero of spirit that she was, I always find the fetishizing of that young girl’s space dicey. More than a little communal guilt and tribal pride, I think, gets worked out in the pilgrimage of that line.
Absurdly cynical? That I just don’t like doing the “to do” thing? (Is there a difference between those two?) In any event, during my years in Amsterdam, I never went to visit Anne, though I always told myself I would before leaving for good. (As I may make that permanent departure after a quick return in March, perhaps I still will then.)
Guarding Anne’s place—not all that well, as it turned out—is not the only role the church plays.
Visible from more spots in the city than anything else the Wester’s spire is topped by a blue-purple dome (with a toothpick-like flag pole) often gives it an onion garnish look. The Cocktail Kerk I call it.
This tower, which looms and dominates, disappears in the narrow view of one street only to reappear at the angle of the next. As it hides behind a four-story house you do not know it there when, suddenly, it peers over you if the next house is but one story short. A monster movie effect, oftentimes you find yourself King-Konging up to the Cocktail Church.
You can walk towards the tower for several hundred meters (along restaurant row) to see only its tower in a rifle-shot view ahead of you and then, as you come to the Bloemgraght, see the church itself, a little like discovering an elephant behind a trunk. No building in the city holds the sky as does the church on that view, a creation in perfect frame. And in the fading sun of the late day, the west side of the spire glows and beams, the last best candle of the day.
Many buildings ring bells in Amsterdam: churches, old defensive towers, a few defunct banks. Most ring on the hour, a few, like the Wester, mark the half hour too. Some of these bong a big bell, the size of the bell being bong-ged suggested by the depth of tone and the bong-ng-ng rings of sound that wave out to the city beneath. By those standards, the bell at the Wester is not only big but, as I have forced everyone who walks with me to confirm, the bong-ng-ng-ngiest in town.
As a happy bell, it tolls for we.
The King Kong-ing and the bong-bong-ing are a few of the reasons the Wester feels like a top spot for saying “goodbye, hope to be back.” But you could do worse than to offer a “tot-ziens” to the Zuider too, owner of one of the town’s most reliable postcard views. For a little while no one was quite sure who owned the building, so we dubbed it The Lost Church. And one summer the Mollys of Molly School rang the bells there, pulling on long ropes, the weight above lifting each of us off the floor as we offered untimely bongs to all beneath, a triumph of its kind.
Naturally, it helps both West and South churches, Oost and Noord too, to have around them a womb-shaped city, a polis where parents cycle, children skip in the streets, and dogs win points. That toll of things you can never forget or leave behind, even if you are far away and long gone.