Meet the middle ages

The year is 1435, and you’re following the bustling throng through the thriving port city of Bruges. Along the way you pass the studio of a famous artist and are surprised to see a prominent priest on his knees as the painter sketches his portrait. You pass through the vast covered harbour where flat-bottomed boats unload the latest cargoes from ocean-going ships moored at Sluis. In the street, a man butchers the carcass of a pig, and, as you pass along to the fish market, a rat scuttles in front of your feet. Suddenly the scent of jasmine and sandalwood engulf your senses as you approach the Oriental bath house.

Everything about the scene is real – except the bit about the scurrying rat. You’re at the new Historium Brugge attraction, which opens this weekend. The attraction, at the very centre of the city, is a €10 million investment that recreates Bruges at the time of its peak as a world city.

Every year, Bruges welcomes about four million visitors from all over the world, attracted by the chocolate, the museums, the canals, the horse-and-carriage tours and the medieval atmosphere. The location of Historium is a prime piece of real estate: Markt 1, a former government building overlooking the city’s most famous square.

The entrance is through an enormous porch in which a wooden floor has been laid. On one entire wall facing the entrance is a panorama of Bruges as it looked in 1435, its perspective such that it seems as if you’re gazing out over the whole city as it then was.

The ground floor and the courtyard outside are open to visitors without paying the entry fee. In the courtyard are public toilets, vending machines and an amphitheatre-shaped meeting point for tour guides. In the entrance hall are a museum shop, a Pol Depla chocolaterie, a desk of the Bruges tourist office and a massive media table for 12, composed of a giant interactive Samsung touchscreen display. There are also free lockers for visitors to stash whatever they’re carrying, even pushchairs and buggies.

Jacob, your guide for the duration

A visit to the attraction proper begins when you scan the barcode on your ticket and make your way into the show. The visit to Historium is built around a fictional narrative: Jacob, an apprentice to the great Flemish primitive painter Jan Van Eyck, is sent to pick up Anna, the model for the Madonna in Van Eyck’s “Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele” (which Van Eyck was working on in 1435).

That’s the start of a love story and a pursuit through the medieval harbour city, which takes the protagonists (and the visitors) to Van Eyck’s studio, to the port and the market, through the alleys to a bath house and, finally, to a breathtaking view of the city about which we won’t leak any details so as not to spoil the surprise.

“We wanted the visit to happen at the rhythm of the story,” explains René Tolenaars, in charge of marketing and communications at the Historium. The story features audio and video, and they’ve recruited actors like Clara Cleymans (Quiz Me Quick) as Anna, Leslie De Gruyter (Parade’s End) as Jan Van Eyck and Peter Van Den Begin (Allez Eddy!) as a wily merchant, as well as rising young jazz drummer Lander Gyselinck as Jacob.

Visitors are equipped with an audio guide in one of nine languages, which tells the story and fills in additional historical details – as well as providing a soundtrack recorded by the Brussels Philharmonic. The love story is told by a film that was shot with the actors in Bruges, as well as in three studios, one of them the biggest Blue Key effects studio in Belgium, where the harbour scene was filmed. The set there also included 200 square metres of authentic cobblestones.

The film was directed by Kene Illegems, who comes from advertising and music videos, and created dance performances for fashion shows for the late Kaat Tilley. His father, Toon, was director of photography. Charlotte Willems, who worked on the TV series De smaak van De Keyser, designed the sumptuous costumes, with the exception of the cloak worn by Anna, model for the Madonna, which was made by Kaat Tilley. (Odorous detail: On the first day of shooting, the two babies playing the infant Jesus between them managed to pee on Clara Cleymans and her priceless cloak no fewer than eight times.

See, hear and smell medieval Bruges

“The idea is to let you explore medieval Bruges using the five senses,” says Tolenaars. So there are temperature and weather effects and things to taste. The Duvelorium on the first floor is a beer-tasting room with a covered terrace looking out over the Markt (Duvel Moortgat is one of the attraction’s strategic partners).

And there are smells. This aspect of the plan intrigued me the most, since a medieval port city must have smelled very particular indeed. Yet no record of how things smelled back then has come down to us. Every other aspect of medieval life was recorded, and physical artefacts of all sorts have endured. But the one aspect of everyday life that would strike us the most – the place, frankly, must have stunk to high heaven – has vanished from the record.

Here Tolenaars disappoints me: “Of course we have chosen the good smells of cooking and wood fires and the scents of the bath house. You couldn’t really include the bad smells or you’d have people turning around and running out the door.”

On the question of smells, as on every other historical detail, Historium consulted a group of experts, including Wim Blockmans, professor of medieval history at Leiden University in the Netherlands; Bruges’ city archivist Noël Geirnaert, author of several books on the city; and historian André Vandewalle, a former city archivist and author.

The detail about the ambient odours aside, my impression is that the creators of this attraction have done their utmost to recreate the experience of the city as it would resonate with a contemporary audience. The technology is cutting-edge, with touchscreens and animatronics, and the attention to detail by the decor artists is worthy of a Hollywood epic.

But these artists are working with paint and plaster, not with CGI. And because it’s not solely for show, there’s also a pedagogical exhibition at the close of the tour, where some of the things you’ve seen are placed in their historical context, leaving the way open for you to return to the city and explore the history further, as it lives and breathes around you in 2012.

Historium is open seven days a week from 25 November, 10.00-18.00 (Thursdays until 21.00). Tickets are €11 for adults and €5.50 for under-14s. A family pass for two adults and three children costs €30. Book online to reserve a date and time slot. Combo tickets, including a walking tour or a visit to the Groeninge Museum, are also available at €15 each.

www.historium.be

Historium in figures

Cost

€10 million, raised by a private group of three families

Subsidy

€1.2 million from the government of Flanders; €375,000 from the province of West Flanders

Time from concept to opening

82 months, starting in January 2006

Total area

3,581 square metres

Admissions

24 visitors for every presentation, once every five minutes; 200,000 visitors expected every year

Length of visit

30 minutes for the attraction, about one hour in total

Win tickets to the Historium!

Flanders Today has five pairs of adult entry tickets to give away. Send an email with the subject “Historium” by noon on Friday, 23 November to editorial<at>flanderstoday.eu and answer the following question: What was the name of Jan Van Eyck’s brother, with whom he painted the Ghent altarpiece “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb”? Winners will be notified by 17.00 the same day.