Mirakelkolom

A column on the Rokin

The Mirakelkolom is a stone column on the Rokin, close to the Wijde Kapelsteeg. It stands among shops, trams and bicycles, and it is easy to walk straight past. It is not large and it is not grand. It is worth a few minutes because of what it remembers: a medieval story about a miracle, and a church that no longer exists.

The church was the Heilige Stede, also called the Nieuwezijds Kapel. It stood on the Rokin to commemorate the Miracle of Amsterdam, which is said to have happened in 1345.

The story goes like this. A dying man received the last rites but could not keep the communion host down and brought it up. The host was thrown on the fire. The next morning it was found in the ashes, unburnt. Whatever you make of the tale, people believed it. A chapel went up, and Amsterdam became a place of pilgrimage. The Heilige Stede was pulled down in 1908.

A column built from leftovers

The column you see dates from 1988, but its stones are much older. After the demolition, parts of the church stood for a while in the garden of the Rijksmuseum. Later they went into storage. The artist Hans 't Mannetje gathered the surviving column drums and a capital and built them into a new column. It has a reinforced core, a cushion-like block on top and a new block at the foot.

The idea came from Geurt Brinkgreve and his foundation Amsterdam Versierd, which wanted the city's history to be visible in the street. The foundation and the Gezelschap van de Stille Omgang paid for it. That is the society behind the Silent Procession, which still walks through the old centre every March. The column cost 67,000 guilders. Auxiliary bishop Joseph Lescrauwaet unveiled it in March 1988.

Its recent life has been restless. It was taken away in 2001 to make room for the building of the North-South metro line. It came back in February 2017, but it did not stand firmly enough, so it was removed and strengthened. It was put back in April 2018.

What to look for

Stand close and read the column like a collage. It is a bundle of pillar shapes, with medieval fragments and modern work sitting together in one piece. Run your eye from the cushion block at the top down to the base.

Then read the text on the lowest block. It is chiselled into the stone in old-style lettering and explains what you are looking at. Most people never see it, because they look at the column and not the foot of it.

Then look at the street around you. The Rokin follows the line of the river Amstel, which once ran here. The traffic, the shop fronts and the tram wires sit on what used to be water. Against that, a column made from the remains of a chapel gone for over a century feels a little stranger, and a little more stubborn.