Handpicked experience · Ghent
Ghent, NetherlandsInstant Confirmation
Ghent holds the most stolen artwork in the world — the Van Eyck altarpiece, taken thirteen times, with one panel missing since 1934.
Two Flemish cities in one crossing rather than a single stop
A specialist accompanying you on foot in both centres
An order of visits that can be set on the day
Door-to-door collection in Amsterdam where available
An air-conditioned vehicle held for your party
A private day from Amsterdam with a vehicle, driver and guide, taking in two Flemish cities: Ghent, still a working university town, and Brugge, the preserved one.
St Bavo's Cathedral holds the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, finished by Jan van Eyck in 1432. It is one of the most important paintings in European art, and it has been the target of theft or seizure around thirteen times.
Calvinists nearly burned it. Napoleon took panels to Paris. Others were sold to Berlin in the nineteenth century and only returned under the Treaty of Versailles as war reparations. In the Second World War the Nazis took it and hid it in an Austrian salt mine, where the Monuments Men found it in 1945 with explosives already in place.
And one panel is still missing. The Just Judges was cut out and stolen in April 1934, and despite a deathbed confession and eighty years of searching, it has never been found. The version you see in that corner is a copy painted in 1945.
This is why the pairing works. Ghent has a large university, a working port and a student population that fills the bars on a Tuesday. Its medieval core is spectacular and it is surrounded by an ordinary, busy Belgian city.
Brugge is quieter, smaller and far more visited per square metre. It is beautiful in a way Ghent is not, and it is also more curated.
Seeing both in a day makes each legible. Alone, Bruges can read as a stage set and Ghent as merely a nice city; together, the difference in what happened to them is obvious.
The altarpiece needs a ticket, bought at the cathedral, and so does the belfry in either city. None of that is part of this arrangement.
Say early in the day if you want to see the Van Eyck, because it changes the order of the visit — the queue is worst in the middle of the day and the room is timed.
Depth. You will walk both centres properly and see neither exhaustively, and the transfer between them takes a slice of the middle of the day.
If you would rather have one city slowly, book the single-city version instead; this one is for people who want the contrast.
Cobbles in both places, and Ghent's are rougher. Lunch is not arranged, so tell your guide when you would like to stop.
Open it to pick a date and work out the price.
What the fare covers, and what to budget for separately.
The practical detail, and the answers people actually ask for.
Twelve panels painted on oak, opening to roughly three and a half metres across.
Around thirteen times it has been the target of theft or seizure, which is a record for any artwork.
Yes — work begun in 2012 stripped centuries of overpaint, and the lamb's face emerged startlingly different.
No, but explosives had already been placed in the mine when it was recovered.
Joos Vijd and his wife Elisabeth Borluut, merchants who kneel on the outer panels.
A copy, painted in 1945, standing in for the panel that has never come back.
Because the contrast explains each: one stayed a working city, the other was preserved by poverty.
About fifty kilometres, so the transfer between them takes well under an hour.