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12 unusual facts about Bruges


Augustus Volney Waller

The heart affection which eventually proved fatal led him to seek rest, and, after staying two years longer in England, he retired first to Bruges and afterwards to Switzerland.

Bruges Group

The group was set up by Lord Harris of High Cross and an Oxford University student Patrick Robertson following Margaret Thatcher's Eurosceptic speech delivered in Bruges in September 1988.

Dutch gable

In Potsdam, Germany, 150 red brick houses featuring steep Dutch gables form part of the city's Dutch Quarter, while in Bruges, Belgium, a wide range of buildings featuring Dutch gables can be found.

Emile Zuckerkandl

Emanuel Margoliash's first publication of sequence data for cytochrome c allowed comparison of the rates of molecular evolution for different proteins (cytochrome c seemed to evolve faster than hemoglobin), which Zuckerkandl discussed at a 1964 conference in Bruges.

Flanders U-boat flotillas

The Flanders flotilla was constituted in March 1915 at the port of Bruges in occupied Belgium.

Francis John Deane

He was born in Madras, India, the son of Francis J. Deane, and was educated in Bruges, Belgium.

Frescobaldi

From an early economic base in the Italian community of cloth merchants in Bruges, the Frescobaldi expanded their banking interests to their home city of Florence in the 13th century.

Grimani

It was produced in Ghent and Bruges ca 1515-1520 and by 1520 owned, though possibly not originally commissioned, by Cardinal Domenico Grimani.

Jaro Procházka

Paintings of Bruges and the Belgian countryside can be considered the pinnacle of his work.

Jon Ola Norbom

He graduated as cand.oecon. from the University of Oslo in 1949, and studied international economics and European integration at the College of Europe in Bruges 1952-1953.

Osgod Clapa

Then Osgod fetched his wife from Bruges; and they went back again with six ships; but the rest went towards Essex, to Eadulf's-ness, and there plundered, and then returned to their ships.

Viktor Bauer

Bauer claimed his first aerial victory on 15 May 1940 west of Bruges, a Royal Air Force (RAF) Hawker Hurricane.


Adriaen Isenbrandt

Till-Holger Borchert - "Adriaan Isenbrant" in the catalogue of the exhibition "Bruges and the Renaissance"; Bruges, 15 August-6 December 1998; ISBN 90-5544-230-5

Anne Percy, Countess of Northumberland

When Graham betrayed her husband to James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, she and her baby escaped to the Continent, arriving in Bruges on 31 August 1570, where she sought aid from Pope Pius V and King Philip II of Spain to raise money for her husband's ransom; the Pope gave her four thousand crowns and King Philip sent her six thousands marks.

Cambio CarSharing

The cambio locations in Belgium in 27 cities, for example: Arlon, Antwerp, Bruges, Brussels, Chiny, Ghent, Hasselt, Kortrijk, Leuven, Lier, Liège, Mechelen, Mons, Namur, Oostende, Ottignies, Turnhout and Zwijndrecht.

Charles Warren Eaton

He particularly favored the countryside around Bruges as well as Lake Como in Italy, which he painted with a particularly bright palette.

Dorjana Širola

In 2011 she won Silver with her club "Europalia" (Derk de Graaf (Netherlands), Thomas Kolåsæter (Norway), Holger Waldenberger (Germany)) at the European Quizzing Championships in Bruges

East Flemish Rowing League

There is also a Charles V Cup, (named for Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor) with races for various boat types and categories of young to old, which takes place on the Canal Ghent-Bruges.

Economy of Belgium

Indeed, Flemish and Walloon economies differ in many respects (consider for instance Eurostats and OECD statistics), and cities like Brussels, Antwerp, Liège, Bruges, Charleroi or Ghent also exhibit significant differences.

Eglė Rakauskaitė

The same year she got a fellowship from the Spike Island International and the participated at the European Cultural Parliament in Bruges where she debated on the issues concerning the identity and politics.

GB Group

In 1961, the first GB hypermarkets are created under the name of Superbazar in Auderghem, Anderlecht and Bruges.

Geoffrey R. Denton

He served as Director of Wilton Park, and formerly as Reader in Economics at the University of Reading (from 1967) and Professor and head of economics at the College of Europe in Bruges.

Jan van Eyck

He married the much younger Margaret around 1432 at about the same time he bought a home in Bruges.

Jean Schramme

Jean Schramme (March 25, 1929, Bruges, Belgium – December 14, 1988, Rondonópolis, Brazil) was a Belgian mercenary leader and farmer, owner of an estate of about 15 square kilometres, and boss of about 1000 indigenous workers.

Johann Veldener

Evidence indicates that Veldener assisted Caxton in setting up his printing office in Bruges and helped printing his first work there, the 1472-1473 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye by Raoul Lefèvre.

Leonard Neale

Father Neale was teaching in the Jesuit college of Bruges when that institution was seized by the Austrian imperial government (area of modern Belgium then called Austrian Netherlands), and along with the other Jesuits was expelled.

Levina Teerlinc

Levina Teerlinc (b. Bruges, 1510–1520?; d. London, 23 June 1576) was a Flemish miniaturist who served as a painter to the English court of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I.

Manneken Pis

Similar statues can also be found in the Belgian cities of Koksijde, Hasselt, Ghent, Bruges, in the town of Braine-l'Alleud (where it is called "Il Gamin Quipiche"), and in the French Flemish village of Broxeele, a town with the same etymology as Brussels.

Master of the Embroidered Foliage

Of the five paintings considered by Friedländer, three are in the United States, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Clark Art Institute, and the other two in Europe, at the Groeningemuseum, Bruges, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.

Miguel de Serpa Soares

Born in 1967 in Angola, Serpa Soares graduated from the University of Lisbon with a law degree in 1990 and Collège d’Europe, Bruges, in 1992 with a Diplôme de Hautes Etudes Juridiques Européennes.

Mother Mary More

Sir Thomas Gage, 6th Baronet, also a recusant, offered them the use of Hengrave Hall near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk where they stayed until 1802, when they returned to Bruges.

Mother More helped English Jesuits and their pupils ejected from their school in Bruges (the predecessor of Stonyhurst College) by the Emperor Joseph II in 1772.

Napoleon's planned invasion of the United Kingdom

From 1803 to 1805 a new army of 200,000 men, known as the Armée des côtes de l'Océan (Army of the Ocean Coasts) or the Armée de l'Angleterre (Army of England), was gathered and trained at camps at Boulogne, Bruges and Montreuil.

Patrick Dewael

When Kurdish terrorist Fehriye Erdal was sentenced to 4 years' imprisonment by a Bruges court on 28 February 2006, it turned out that she had shaken off the Belgian secret service, which had had the responsibility of following her since 23 February 2006 (Erdal had been under house arrest since 2000).

PCC streetcar

The PCC technology was exported to Europe, with La Brugeoise et Nivelles (now the BN division of Bombardier) of Bruges, Belgium, building several hundred streetcars that saw service in Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, The Hague, Saint-Étienne, Marseille and Belgrade (the latter city buying vehicles initially used by the Belgian Vicinal railways).

Philip Klapwijk

After studies at the London School of Economics and the College of Europe in Bruges where he obtained degrees in economics he started work as an analyst with Gold Fields Mineral Services (now GFMS), a precious metals and base metals forecasting & consultancy company specialising in global gold, silver, platinum and palladium market research, reports, annual reviews and analysis.

Pierre Defraigne

Pierre Defraigne is also Professor of economics at the Institutes for European Studies (Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis and Université Catholique de Louvain) and at the College of Europe, Bruges, and is a Visiting Professor at Zhejiang University, China.

Renaissance of the 12th century

Hanseatic cities outside the Holy Roman Empire were, for instance, Bruges, London and the Polish city of Danzig (Gdańsk).

Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin

In addition to the Boston version, there are notable copies in Munich (Alte Pinakothek, c. 1483), St. Petersburg (The Hermitage, 1475–1500), and Bruges (Groeningemuseum, variously dated).

Scottish trade in the Middle Ages

Although Bruges remained the major trading partner, from the 1460s trade also developed with Veere, Bergen op Zoom and Antwerp.

Sir John Donne

The Donne Triptych by Hans Memling would presumably have been made in Bruges, and is believed to date from the 1470s.

Till-Holger Borchert

He has curated a number of major exhibitions, including "Memling's Portraits", which showed in Bruges, at the Frick Collection in New York and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.

Trading Diaspora

As Gosch explains “premodern world system was to some extent an “archipelago of towns” in which urban centers in Europe (Bruges, Ghent, Genoa and Venice), the Middle East (Cairo, Aden, and Hormuz), and Asia (Samarkand, Calicut, Kanchipuram, Malacca, Quanzhou and Hangzhou) were connected to one another by trade and shared in a common culture of commerce.

Venice for Lovers

Several European cities have been compared to Venice: The Breton city Nantes has been called The Venice of the West, while the nickname The Venice of the North has been variously applied to Amsterdam, Birmingham, Bornholm, Bruges, Haapsalu, Maryhill, Saint Petersburg and Stockholm.

Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele

Saint Donatian of Reims, patron saint of Bruges' collegiate church, stands to the left, with Saint George (van der Paele's name saint) dressed in the pomp of a medieval knight's armour, to the right.

William Bruges

Bruges was also responsible for producing his Bruges Garter Book around 1430, which is the earliest known armorial of the order.