The Belgium Story :Part 4 - The Castle of the Counts

Every year around the months of June- July, a strange procession sets out on the streets of Ghent. The citizens of Ghent parade the city barefoot, with black and white nooses around the necks. On the 3rd of May 1540, Ghent was witness to a similar procession. Only that, that day, it was neither a celebration nor a tradition. There was no cheer in the air around.It was a show of public humiliation.

The previous year Ghent had risen in revolt against Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. The city was by then an international centre of trade and industry and therefore an important source of revenue for Spain. The Flemish felt that the the taxes were used only to fight wars abroad. Determined to bend the stubborn head of the citizenry, the emperor obliged the city's nobles to walk in front of the him barefoot wearing nooses . Ever since, the people of Ghent have been called Stroppendragers (noose bearers).Ironically Charles V was born in Ghent.

Ghent has a parallel history of rebellions and suppression - all inextricably linked to her industry and trade.The mercantile elite and the gentry had been knotted in a prolonged power struggle, while the craftsmen began to rally for their rights as early as the 14th century. Incidentally, the first trade union of Belgium was founded in Ghent



Today the Gravensteen (Castle of the Counts) is an exhibit of the dark times. The stone fortress was erected for Philip of Alsace, who was the count of Flanders from 1157 to 1191 based on the ideas he gathered from his fellow crusaders. After 300 years of serving as a stronghold of the counts, the castle moved to a different functional phase. It became a cotton mill, a prison and a money mint. How does this multi-tasking work? The prisoners sweated out in its dark little rooms as cotton fabrics poured out of its doors. Now there was a reason to keep the prisoners alive and a reason to keep them there. At present, the castle arranges for the visitor a display of the medieval torture equipment. (Strange enough, its architecture bends perfectly to each of the uses that it is put to).

I saw an enthusiastic tour guide explain to a bunch of five- year-olds, the function of metal weights and chains with spikes as they bunched around him gripped by the ghost story. I followed the circuit of torture and underground isolation chambers inhaling the musty smell that lingers in the stone walls. And when I came out, the nausea was not just due to the dark and the damp.

Ghent is a delightful city now. But her ghosts refuse to be driven out. Eventually you meet them on the streets, albeit tamed as a festival of humiliation or as a musealisation of torture.