Six months later than planned, the Canon of Flanders was presented today: 60 events, dates, people, traditions, books, objects and works of art that define today's Flanders. The canon is a list of events, people and traditions that are generally accepted as important and which should be familiar to all the members of a particular community. Discover some of the sixty here!
An extraordinary amount has been said and written about the Flemish Canon in Flanders since the initiative was announced almost four years ago. Only as of today do we know the contents of that Canon of Flanders and can the discussion really take off.
Nine experts - historians, philosophers, journalists and art historians - compiled this chronological list, following the example of the Canon of the Netherlands. The announcement of the content of the Flemish Canon had been scheduled for October last year, but the selection took longer than expected.
From more than 500 possible topics, 60 so-called "windows" were eventually chosen. Though the assignment was commissioned by the Flemish government (and the Flemish nationalist party N-VA in particular attaches great importance to this list), the committee stresses that the Canon was created without political interference.
As in the popular television series "The Story of Flanders", the Canon starts about 12,000 years ago, just after the last ice age and includes the Celts on Kemmel Hill and the Gallo-Romans in Tongeren - not forgotten!
The Flemish Canon runs chronologically and begins with the oldest traces of human habitation. We find these in Limburg, in Veldwezelt. There in the Maas Valley, Neanderthals mined flints 58,000 to even 133,000 years ago.
In Rosmeer in Haspengouw, archaeologists discovered one of the oldest agricultural settlements; the loamy Haspengouw soil was already popular among the first farmers more than 7,000 years ago.
Inclusion of the Battle of the Golden Spurs was a certainty from the start. The unexpected victory against the French army of knights on 11 July 1302 even features twice in the Canon: as a historical fact and as the romantic version written by Hendrik Conscience in his 1838 novel “The Lion of Flanders”.
In this tome the writer helped to lay the foundations for the Flemish emancipation movement with literature helping the movement establish itself firmly in the 19th century, the committee says.
The Flemish movement and the battle for recognition of the Dutch language are also championed by the "three crowing cockerels", the nickname for Frans Van Cauwelaert, Louis Franck and Camille Huysmans who, as members of parliament in 1910, promised to work for a Dutch-language university. It was not until 1930 that a law was passed to turn Ghent University into a Dutch-language university, with August Vermeylen as its first rector.
World War I also had an impact on that language struggle. The IJzer Tower in Diksmuide symbolises the pursuit of Flemish autonomy, the committee writes. It calls the tower "one of the most controversial monuments in Flanders". The establishment of the language border in 1962, by the way, is also included in the Canon.
The committee clearly wanted to distance itself from the hype of the day and deliberately chose not to include living persons. The most recent events in the list date back almost 20 years. The first gay marriage took place on 6 June 2003, the euro was introduced a year earlier, these events are numbers 57 and 58 in the Canon.
In "Le plat pays" Brusseler Jacques Brel sang of the Flemish landscape like no other and has been rewarded for it with a place in the Canon. He called himself a Fleming, but one who spoke French.
Festival culture too typifies Flanders ever since the Chiro youth movement started the Rock Werchter Festival in 1975. The festival grew into one of Europe's biggest events with Flemish know-how in lighting, sound, stages and screens today used all over the world.
Finally, besides summer festivals and the proverbial brick in the stomach – the Fleming’s love of building their own home, there is one sport that completes a Canon of Flanders: cycling. The Tour of Flanders has been known as Flanders' finest for 110 years. According to the authors, cycling is the only sport that is immediately known as "typically Flemish", even outside Flanders.