Dutch History

7447 This is a fisherman mending nets in the museum.

7480 This old church has a ship hanging in the middle, an old fishing village tradition.

7498 This is the Yawner on the apothecary building.

7512 The museum windmill.  On the other side of that dyke is the Ziderzee.

7513 A village assembly at the museum.  This is where the ladies in period dress are located.

 

April 09 – Enkhuizen, The Netherlands PM.  Enkhuizen is an outdoor cultural museum made up of building moved here from other parts of the Netherlands.  Sort of like Williamsburg, Virginia or Greenfield Village next to, and part of, the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.  For example, Greenfield has the Wright Brothers Bicycle Shop, Edison's Menlo Park Laboratories, and a Cotswold stone cottage all disassembled and moved to Dearborn and reassembled. 

 

Enkhuizen has done the same thing in the Zuiderzeemuseum (The South Sea Museum).  (The Dutch concatenate adjectives and nouns just like the Germans.  They have a little harbor with copies of historical fishing boats, a lime kiln to produce lime, what else, to mix with cement for mortar, a herring smoking building, a windmill, fisherman's shed where they used to mend and knit nets, an old school, an old church and styles of old houses from all over the Netherlands.  It's an interesting place.  You can see the buildings from different historical periods almost side by side for comparison.  The church even had a graveyard with old tombstones set up in it.  They have a few clusters of buildings where docents dressed in period costumes will talk to you as though they were in the 1700s.  Our guide spoke to them in Dutch and translated our questions and their answers.  It was fun to hear their views and neighborhood gossip.

 

They turned the interior of one business building over to a Delft tile artist to decorate however he wanted.  The entire inside is tiled in Delft blue tiles ranging form very small to very large.  It was great.

 

One very interesting place was the Apothecary.  Outside it had a carved head of a woman with a crown and her mouth wide open.  These carvings are called "Yawners" by the Dutch and where the sign that there was a dentist in the building.  Inside, through the apothecary was a room holding one man's collection of Yawners.  They were mostly dressed as soldiers, policemen, Arabs and a queen or two.  Most of them were destroyed or discarded.  His collection is the largest one known.

 

The fisherman was smoking some herring and had some smoked samples of eel for us.  It was really good but a lot of people were too picky and wouldn't try it.  Their loss, it was really good.  It was a fun visit and a nice walk on a very nice day.