It is the one day in the liturgical year when the Church herself is structurally silent, holding the interval between death and resurrection without resolving it prematurely.

What you wear on a day like that is either a response to it, or not.

And this is not a metaphor. The Catholic Church has always known that dress is a theological act before it is an aesthetic one, and she encoded that knowledge in silk, wool, and colour with a precision no secular institution has matched.

Vestment colours change by season and feast. The weight of silk and wool varies by occasion. The specific symbolic register of each liturgical garment communicates the nature of the day to anyone who walks through the doors. You can read the liturgical year from the colour of the celebrant’s chasuble. The clothes tell you where you are in the story of salvation.

That logic did not begin with the Church. It ran through every functioning culture in history.

The Dutch burgher of the seventeenth century dressed with a sobriety that was not poverty and not Puritanism. It was deliberateness: dark wool, clean lines, absence of unnecessary ornaments. These were not the result of not caring. Every choice communicated something about the man’s relationship to his work, his community, his God. The clothes were legible, and that legibility was not accidental. It was the point.

Something destroyed that legibility. Three things, in fact. And understanding what they destroyed is the only way to begin recovering it.

What destroyed it?

Three diseases, at different price points, but with the same pathology.

Before you judge your own wardrobe, consider this: all three of these diseases operate in the same way. They ask nothing of the wearer.

1. The first is casual dress as cultural surrender. The normalisation of casualwear as the default register of public life did not happen because people became more comfortable. It happened because the obligation to dress, to present yourself to others as someone who had considered the occasion, was reframed as an imposition. Casual dress is the sartorial equivalent of the therapeutic culture’s approach to obligation: if it costs you effort, it is not worth keeping.

The consequences are visible and precise. A man who wears the same clothes to a funeral, a job interview, a first date, and a Saturday morning errand has not achieved freedom from convention. He has achieved the condition of a person to whom no occasion is distinct, which is to say, a person for whom nothing is serious. The clothes communicate that before he opens his mouth.

The Dutch word deftig once described a quality of bearing: serious, considered, appropriate to the weight of the moment. It did not mean formal, but meant that the person before you had registered what the moment required and responded to it. A deftige man dressed accordingly. The concept has been laughed out of the language. What replaced it is the word gezellig: cosy, convivial, without edges. The country chose comfort over gravity and got both wrong.

2. The second disease is fast fashion and disposability. The average European now buys roughly sixty-eight new items of clothing per year. The average item is worn seven times before it is discarded. These are not statistics about poverty. They are statistics about a broken relationship with objects. A garment worn seven times is not a garment. It is a prop for a photograph. It is the physical embodiment of an attention span.

Fast fashion did not only corrupt taste, but abolished the conditions under which taste can develop. Taste requires repetition: the same garment worn across different occasions, seasons, contexts, until you understand what it does well and what it does not. When the garment is gone in a few months, that knowledge never forms. The person who buys sixty-eight items per year does not have a wardrobe, but a landfill in waiting.

3. The third disease is luxury kitsch, and it is the most insidious because it mimics the cure. Heritage brands understood thirty years ago that the market for authenticity was growing. Their response was not to become more authentic. It was to perform authenticity more convincingly.

Burberry, which I worked for, produces a coat that carries the same tartan and the same name it has carried since 1856. The coat is now made in Thailand, cut to a fit designed by a committee, finished to a standard that no Castleford mill worker of 1920 would have recognised. Yet… the price has tripled, but the quality has halved. The brand has invested the difference in advertising that communicates heritage.

This is kitsch in its precise definition: the form of excellence without the structures that made it possible. The trench coat pretends to be a trench coat. The brogue pretends to be a brogue. The man wearing them performs being someone who cares about quality, while neither he nor the brand has submitted to the actual discipline that quality requires.

The three diseases are not separate problems. They are the same abdication operating at different budgets. The man in athleisure, the man in a Zara suit, and the man in a twenty-five-hundred-euro Burberry coat are all, in different registers, wearing clothes that ask nothing of them. The first has given up entirely. The second is performing effort without making it. The third is paying to borrow the appearance of a standard he has not actually met.

There is a standard that does ask something of you. It always existed. It has specific requirements for how to handle a garment before you buy it, for how to build a wardrobe across years rather than seasons, for what it means to dress for an occasion rather than for yourself.

That standard is recoverable. The formation framework below sets out exactly how to apply it, beginning with a single garment in your hands.

If you are a member and want to talk through what that looks like in your own wardrobe, your own life, your own context, I am offering every paid subscriber one 30-minute 1-1 call with me.

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The same wax used for the dead. One by one, psalm by psalm, the candles were extinguished. When the final psalm ended, the last flame was carried behind the altar and hidden. The church dissolved into absolute blackness.

Then came the strepitus: the great noise. Books slammed onto pews. Feet stamped on stone floors. The sound rolled through the nave like the tremor of an earthquake, the chaos of the disciples, the signal to leave a lightless sanctuary.

This was Tenebrae. Three nights in a row: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: culminating in the same silence, the same darkness, the same sudden disappearance of all comfort. The faithful departed without a blessing, without a hymn, without consolation. It had been prayed continuously since at least the ninth century. But abolished in the 1950-1960s.

What was lost was not a ceremony, but a language of the senses, a register of grief, a way of inhabiting death itself. The reformed liturgy could teach about suffering, could sing the Passion, could offer knowledge. Yet it could not make you feel the abandonment, the darkness, the absence of God in your bones.

What Holy Week looked like

The old Holy Week did not merely intensify ordinary Sunday observance. It reshaped time itself.

It began on Palm Sunday, before the Mass even started, with a ceremony so elaborate it was a liturgy in miniature. Priests in violet vestments blessed the palms, their prayers echoing the structure of the Mass itself. The congregation followed a procession that wound through or around the church. Behind closed doors, a choir sang Gloria, laus et honor. The priest knocked. The doors opened. The procession entered. One hour passed before the Mass began. The hour was not counted in minutes; it was measured in the rhythm of steps, prayers, and song.

Then came the Passion sung in three voices carrying three roles: the narrative (Chronista), the crowd (Synagoga), and Christ (Christus) Himself. The celebrant sang Christ’s voice in a tone made for mourning, each verse begun with a long descant that hung in the air. When Christ died in the text, the singing paused, everyone on the altar and pews kneeling. Silence fell. The death of God was held in the Church as a living thing.

This repetition stretched through Holy Tuesday and Spy Wednesday. Three days, three evenings, the Passion sung in full, in three voices, in a voice of grief. By Holy Thursday, the congregation carried the weight of three deaths in their bodies. The week had accumulated meaning beyond any single ritual.

Holy Thursday was the Mass of the Institution, celebrated in the morning. Afterwards, the altars were stripped bare, the tabernacle left open and empty. From that evening until Easter morning, no Mass would be celebrated, no Blessed Sacrament rested on the main altar. The church had been altered. You could see it. You could feel it.

Good Friday was not a commemoration. It was the Missa Praesanctificatorum, a rite whose roots reached to Jerusalem itself. The priest prostrated in silence before the bare altar.

The Passion of St. John was sung, again in three voices. Then came twelve solemn prayers for the whole world: Church, Pope, clergy, catechumens, heretics, schismatics, Jews, pagans: each introduced by Oremus, flectamus genua, levate: let us pray, kneel, rise.

The cross was unveiled in three stages, each with Ecce lignum crucis. The congregation approached on their knees. No music sounded or organ played. Silence dominated the church until Easter Saturday.

Holy Saturday was the mother of all vigils. Outside the church, fire was struck from flint, new and primal. Twelve prophecies unfolded from Genesis to Exodus to the prophets, sweeping salvation history to the empty tomb. The Easter candle plunged three times into the baptismal font, chrism poured, breath blown across the water. Saints were invoked in litany. And just before dawn, the first Mass of Easter began in darkness, ending as light broke, as if creation itself were completing its work.

This was not a liturgical theatre. It offered an environment; temporal, physical, sensory, that made the congregation’s body feel the death and resurrection.

The First Incision: Maxima Redemptionis, 1955

In 1948, Pius XII quietly convened a Pontifical Commission for the Reform of the Liturgy. Annibale Bugnini, its secretary, would later become the architect of post-conciliar reform. The meetings were secret, shrouded in ‘absolute secrecy,’ as Bugnini admitted. Even when the renewed Order for Holy Saturday was published in 1951, officials of the Congregation of Rites were caught by surprise.

In 1955, Pius XII issued Maxima Redemptionis. The decree reworked Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil. The stated purpose was pastoral: churches were empty in the morning hours when these rites were traditionally celebrated. The Easter Vigil was now celebrated on Saturday morning rather than the night before Easter Sunday; Good Friday at nine o’clock instead of the hour of the Crucifixion. Schoolboys replaced working men at the Holy Thursday footwashing ceremony because laypeople could not attend.

The change was not unreasonable. What broke the experience was the logic behind it.

The Palm Sunday procession lost its pre-Mass ceremony. Violet vestments: the royal colour of Western Christianity, gave way to red. The procession could now sing Christus vincit, a hymn never before part of this rite, or another hymn ;in honour of Christ the King.’ The ceremonial folded chasubles of deacon and subdeacon disappeared, replaced with dalmatic and tunicle.

But the true rupture was structural. Moving the principal Triduum liturgies to the morning meant Tenebrae could no longer occur on the preceding night. Matins and Lauds of Holy Thursday were anticipated only in cathedrals. The three great night offices; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, long concluded in darkness and silence, were now to be prayed in daylight, before work began.

Technically correct, yes. Functionally, the ceremony was abolished. Tenebrae at nine in the morning, in a lit church, was not Tenebrae. The darkness, the silence, the bodily anticipation are all gone. Only the name remained.

Bishops protested. Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin warned that the reforms might unsettle the faith of their people. Evelyn Waugh, novelist and Catholic convert, called the changes ruinous. None of it mattered. Maxima Redemptionis became obligatory.

The Second Incision: Vatican II and the Logic of Completion

The 1955 reform was not the endpoint. It was the proof of concept. If the most ancient, stable ceremonies of the Roman Rite could be altered: hours changed, ceremonial reduced, structure reworked, and nothing was permanently sacred. Bugnini understood this better than anyone.

Under Paul VI, the post-conciliar commission completed the work. The 1969 Novus Ordo stripped it further, removed what remained of the pre-1955 world.

The Good Friday prostration survived. The unveiling of the cross survived. The Exsultet and Easter Vigil survived, but only in their reformed 1955 forms. What disappeared were the twelve prophecies of the Vigil, reduced to seven, then four. The three-voice Passion, already simplified, lost its depth. Tenebrae, already functionless, vanished entirely.

By 1970, attending Holy Week in an ordinary parish meant encountering none of the following: the full pre-Mass ceremony of Palm Sunday, the three consecutive Passion evenings, the bare and open tabernacle, the twelve solemn Good Friday prayers, the twelve prophecies of the Vigil, Tenebrae on any night. The sensory world of Holy Week; the accumulation, the darkness, the silence, the structural transformation of the church, had been fully erased.

What remained was compressed, accessible, a one-week intensification of ordinary liturgical practice. Theologically correct, maybe. Meaningful, maybe. But definitely not the same religion in terms of spirituality.

What is gone

The modern Holy Week is not completely empty of knowledge. The death and resurrection of Christ are proclaimed. The sacraments are observed. The congregation participates. Everything is theologically intact.

But what is gone cannot be measured in facts or words. It is the bodily experience of death.

The pre-1955 Holy Week worked on the congregation as fasting works: not by telling you what deprivation feels like, but by producing it in your body.

You did not learn that Christ died. You experienced something like death: the bare altar, the empty tabernacle, the stripped church, three evenings of darkness, the strepitus shattering the silence. These were not symbols. They were mourning itself, imposed physically over days, shaping your senses, your nervous system, your attention.

Tenebrae did not end with a blessing. The clergy and the faithful left in silence. That abruptness, that absence, was its point.

The modern liturgy cannot give it. Its entire logic runs in the opposite direction: toward participation, accessibility, comprehension. These are virtues, not failings, but they make the experience of abandonment, of absence, of a God not available for comfort, impossible. The old Holy Week gave it through the body, over time, inescapable.

What you can do

Ideally you go to a traditional parish to encounter Holy Week seriously. If not possible: you need materials, structure, and commitment.

• Fasting. The old Eucharistic fast began at midnight: no food, no water, until Communion. Pius XII reduced it to three hours; Paul VI to one. You can still fast from midnight. From Holy Thursday through Easter Sunday morning, it costs something real, and it produces something real. Easter Sunday Communion becomes unmistakable if you have gone hungry through the night.

The Wednesday fast before Holy Thursday; bread and water only, is even older. It asks nothing but your decision. Its austerity carries weight.

• Tenebrae. In recent years, some churches have revived the pre-1955 ceremonies. If none is near, you can pray Tenebrae privately. Angelus Press publishes booklets; texts are online. You need a dark room, a candle, and silence. Read the Lamentations of Jeremiah aloud. Extinguish candles one by one. Hide the final flame. Sit in darkness. Do not resolve the silence with music or conversation. Do this Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Even simplified, it produces something the reformed liturgy cannot.

• The Liturgical Year. Dom Prosper Guéranger’s L’Année liturgique gives commentary for every day of Holy Week in the traditional rite. Reading it morning and evening takes twenty minutes. It maps the structure, the rationale, the meaning behind every hour, every empty tabernacle, every silent organ. It is not the same as being inside a church, but it is the next best thing.

The old Holy Week did not vanish because it was superseded. It did not fail. It disappeared because a commission decided to make the ancient rites accessible, a Pope signed the decree, and another Pope used it to finish the job. The Church, which had maintained these ceremonies since the ninth century, simply stopped.

The riches remain. They can be rediscovered, imposed on yourself, experienced in fragments, in fasting, in silence, in candlelight. It is not nothing. In a week designed to teach loss, beginning is the proper act.

Have a great Holy Week,

-Robbert

Heritage Standard is a paid publication for those who inherited a civilisation but not the instruction manual. Every week: a free essay naming what was lost, and a paid essay showing what to do about it. (This is a paid post)

The first time I stood at a hive with him, I was wearing full protective gear, gloves stiff and unfamiliar, the veil slightly clouded by my own breath. He had none of it.

He is ninety-two years old and has been keeping bees for longer than most people I know have been alive. He learned from someone older than himself, who learned from someone older still. The knowledge did not begin with him, and it will not end with him.

He moved through the apiary without hesitation, not as a display of confidence, but with the ease of repetition. The bees did not ignore him. They adjusted to him, as though his presence were already accounted for.

He did not explain what he knew. He showed it in decisions that would have been invisible to anyone without the context to see them. When to open a hive, when to leave it alone, how to read the mood of the colony before anything had visibly changed.

He returned every season because the work required it. Not when it was convenient, and not when he felt inclined. Over time, that requirement shaped him.

I have not met a freer man.

The problem is not loneliness but the absence of obligation

Most people describe their condition as loneliness, but I would say that is not precise enough. Loneliness is a feeling. And feelings fluctuate. The more stable problem is structural.

You do not feel alone because you lack options. You are that way because there is very little in your life that requires you to be present at a particular place, at a particular time, regardless of how you feel about it that day.

Over the past fifty years, the institutions that once created those requirements have either been dismantled or reduced to voluntary participation. The parishes, the guilds, the association, the regular shared meal, the fixed gathering tied to a calendar rather than preference. What remains are choices, and choices, however abundant, do not bind.

The result is a form of life in which almost everything is optional, and therefore very little holds.

What obligation actually does

Obligation is often treated as a burden, something to be minimised or escaped. That interpretation misses its function.

The word itself derives from the Latin obligare, meaning to bind. Not to imprison, but to fasten one thing to another in a way that creates continuity.

A person who is bound in this sense is not constrained so much as located. There is somewhere he is expected to be, people who notice whether he arrives, and consequences, however small, if he does not.

Remove that structure and what remains feels like freedom, but behaves more like weightlessness. It becomes difficult to commit, difficult to build, and difficult to be known in any stable way.

What we lost

For most of European history, obligation was embedded in ordinary life.

The parish structured time through a shared calendar of attendance and observance. The guild structured work through standards that could not be unilaterally redefined. The confraternity structured social and charitable life through repeated, accountable participation.

Membership implied requirement. One did not attend when it felt meaningful. One attended because that was what belonging entailed.

Across the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, these structures were first weakened and then, in many cases, removed. Legal reforms dissolved guilds and curtailed religious institutions. Cultural shifts reframed obligation as something suspect, something in tension with personal freedom. What survived was the language of community without the corresponding cost.

We retained the appearance, but discarded the mechanism.

The Result in Practice

Consider the last week of your life in its ordinary detail.

Not the highlights, but the structure of it.

Where did you have to be, regardless of how you felt about it? Who was expecting you in a way that would have registered if you failed to appear? What, in your current life, depends on your continued presence rather than your intermittent interest?

It is possible to move through an entire week with no real answer to any of these questions.

If that is the case, the issue is not emotional. It is structural. There is too little in your life that binds you to anything beyond preference, and preference does not hold under pressure.

You do not need more options. You need something that does not yield to them.

There are still a small number of structures capable of doing that. Most people will not choose any of them, even when they recognise the need.

If you are going to, it has to be deliberate.

A Practical Framework: Choosing One Obligation

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Every spring, somewhere in the English Midlands, you can walk a footpath that has existed for six hundred years, running directly through someone’s garden.

The Ordnance Survey map shows it. The right-of-way is legally protected. The homeowner, politely, or irritably, asks you to go round. You do not. Because the path was there before the house, and the house was built knowing that.

This is one of the last visible traces of a world Parliament spent a century dismantling. The path remains because footpaths were hard to extinguish. Everything else; the right to graze the common, to glean the stubble fields after harvest, to cut wood from the lord’s forest, to fish the river, hunt small game, or to gather peat from the fen is gone.

Replaced by fences. Replaced by title deeds. Replaced by the word property, which sounds like it belongs to the person but means, in practice, that you do not.

The enclosures were taught as agricultural modernisation. That is the Whig version. The honest version is simpler: Parliament took what belonged to everyone and confiscated it, or gave it to private owners. Between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual acts enclosed 6.8 million acres: roughly one-fifth of England converting customary right into legal title and common obligation into the cash wage.

The peasant who had grazed his animals on the common for ten generations was compensated, if at all, with a smaller and less arable parcel of land, or allowed to remain only on condition he take on the prohibitive expense of fencing his allotment.

He was, legally, freer than before. Yet had never been more alone.

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What the common actually was

Before we mourn it, we need to understand what it was. The common was not wilderness or sentiment. It was a system of interlocking obligations that made rural life legible and survivable.

The medieval peasant’s relationship to land was not ownership in any modern sense. He held strips in the open fields: typically forty to eighty strips, scattered across the manor to distribute good and poor soil equitably.

The common land was controlled by the lord of the manor, but commoners held specific rights over it: pasture (grazing animals), pannage (letting pigs forage), estovers (cutting wood for fuel and repair), piscary (fishing), turbary (cutting peat or turf). These were not privileges. They were enforceable legal rights, attached to a man’s tenancy, recognised by the manorial court.

The gleaning right deserves particular attention. After the harvest, the poor had the right to enter the fields and collect what the reapers left behind. This is not charity, but comes from Ruth in the fields of Boaz. It is Leviticus 19:9 ‘you shall not reap your field to its very border’ that was codified into English common law. The Church had made it a moral obligation; the manorial system made it an enforceable one.

What this system gave the peasant was not comfort. His life was still hard, his rent was a reality, and his obligations to the lord were extensive.

But it gave him a floor. A man with use-rights could not be made redundant. He could not be evicted by a market. His poverty had a structure around it: the parish knew his name, the manorial court recognised his claim, the common fed his animals, the field fed his children after harvest. He was bound, and being bound, he was placed.

The Latin word is pertinere: ‘to belong to’ or ‘to pertain to’. The peasant pertained to a place. The place pertained to him. This is not nostalgic romanticism, but a legal and social fact.

What the Parliament did

After 1750, parliamentary enclosure acts became the preferred method for transforming common land into private property. The mechanics were straightforward and the outcome was predetermined.

A typical round of enclosure began when one prominent landholder initiated it by petition to Parliament. The commissioners appointed to oversee the process were invariably of the same class and outlook as the major landholders who had petitioned in the first place.

They awarded themselves the best land and the most of it. The commoner was compensated. The compensation was insufficient. The allotment he received required fencing: a cost he could not meet. So he sold, and moved. He arrived in Manchester or Birmingham with nothing but his labour and no claim on anyone.

The justification was efficiency. The land would produce more under consolidated ownership. This was probably true, in narrow agricultural terms. It is the same argument used today to demolish a neighbourhood of family shops and replace it with a distribution centre. Output rises. Everything else disappears.

The poets saw it immediately. Oliver Goldsmith in 1770: The man of wealth and pride / Takes up a space that many poor supplied.

John Clare, who was from Northamptonshire and watched the enclosure of his parish in the early nineteenth century, wrote about it for the rest of his life. He called the commons his home. He meant it literally. He described enclosure not as injustice but as erasure: the landscape he had learned to read: every path, every field name, and every hollow was rearranged into something he no longer recognised. He was not displaced and made illegible.

Clare eventually went mad. The diagnosis was melancholy. He spent his last twenty-three years in an asylum, writing poetry about fields that no longer existed.

What was truly lost

The modern telling of this story focuses on poverty. The enclosures made the poor poorer, drove them into factories, created the industrial proletariat. This is true. It is also not the deepest loss.

The deepest loss was the grammar of mutual obligation. What the common-right system gave the peasant was not just economic security. It gave him a position.

He was a commoner: a legal category, a person with standing before the manorial court, a man whose rights existed not because the state granted them but because he occupied a particular place in a particular community over time. His poverty was real. His position was also real. The two coexisted in a way modernity finds incoherent.

The cash wage replaced the use-right. This sounds like a lateral substitution. It is not. The use-right was relational: it connected the peasant to a specific piece of land, to the lord above him, to the commoners beside him, to the parish around him. The cash wage connects a man to nothing that is obliged to keep him.

It is pure abstraction. He can spend it anywhere, and belongs nowhere.

This is the sentence modernity has been trying to avoid since 1750: freedom of movement is the experience of having nowhere that is yours. The man who can go anywhere pertains to nothing. He is not liberated. He is dissolved.

Holy Week

If the enclosures show us what it means to be untethered from a place and a community, the liturgy of Holy Week shows the opposite: how loss and the passage of time can be rendered particular, and how belonging can be deliberately formed through attention, ritual, and structure.

In a few days, Holy Week will begin. The Church will undertake actions that, to the modern eye, may appear as acts of deprivation.

The statues are veiled, and the altar is stripped. On Good Friday, the tabernacle stands open and empty. The sanctuary, which throughout the year has served as a place of comfort and orientation, is rendered strange. The familiar is withheld. Colour disappears. The Alleluia is not sung. The bells fall silent on Holy Thursday and do not ring again until the Easter Vigil.

This is not an act of cruelty. Rather, it represents an intensification of the particular. The Church does not render the season vague or indistinct; she renders it more specific, more localised, and more demanding of both the senses and the will.

The darkness of Holy Saturday is not a generalised or abstract darkness. It is this darkness in this place on this night before this dawn. Place and time are made to matter more, not less. The emptiness is deliberate. The observer is not free to feel whatever he wishes; he is being formed, through deprivation and encounter, to receive it.

The enclosures moved in the opposite direction. They stripped what was particular, this common, these rights, this community, and transformed it into abstract price.

As Hilaire Belloc argued in The Servile State, the transformation of customary rights into legal abstractions did not merely redistribute land; it reshaped the very structure of obligation, leaving individuals formally free yet socially untethered.

In contrast, the Church, through her liturgy, takes that which is general, the passage of time, the experience of loss, and renders it particular, invested with meaning and form in sacred drama.

One movement produces a man who belongs nowhere. The other produces a man who knows precisely where he stands.

The move is a shift in perception, not a programme.

When someone claims that a new policy, regulation, or development will bring freedom: freedom of choice, freedom of movement, freedom from dependency, it is worth asking what it is replacing.

Freedom from dependency is only valuable if the dependency it removes was unjust. A man freed from his use-rights was not liberated from oppression; he was severed from the only structure that recognised him.

This observation applies with equal force today. The gig economy offers freedom from the employment relationship.

The driver waits in a car he does not own, for an app that does not know his name, in a city to which he will never belong. The digital nomad is free from place.

The consumer exercises freedom of choice across a thousand identical products manufactured in the same factory. Each form of freedom exists; each exists within a vacuum, detached from the structures that give life meaning and stability.

This Saturday’s essay:

How to find the one local obligation worth building your life around. For members only.

The alternative is not nostalgia for the manorial system. It is the recovery of a principle: that real human life requires a floor, and that floor is constructed from particular obligations to particular people in a particular place. The parish. The neighbourhood. The workshop. The family. The tradition that carries a name.

The peasant who lost his gleaning rights was given a wage. The wage bought bread. The bread fed him. And he ate it alone, in a city that did not know him, with no claim on anyone.

That is not freedom. It is what remains when freedom has been separated from everything that made it livable. It is freedom in name alone, untethered, abstract, and incapable of sustaining a human life.

—Robbert

Most people walk through old cities without seeing them.

They see the surfaces, gabled facades, the worn stone, and a market square with its café umbrellas. But they feel something: a vague pleasantness, an ‘atmosphere’, which is tourist language for: I felt something but cannot say what. So they take photographs, and then leave.

Yet… they have not read the city. Only glanced at it.

See, this is not their fault entirely. No one taught them the grammar. And like any language, urban form has a grammar: a set of rules governing where things go and why, who built what and under what authority, which arrangements encode power and which encode submission.

Once you learn that grammar, you cannot unlearn it. Because every historic city becomes a legible document. You will walk through it the way a trained reader walks through a manuscript… seeing not just letters but argument.

In this guide I will teach you that grammar.

It will not be a history lesson. It is a perceptual framework of ten specific things to look for on any walk through a European city that was built before 1800.

Master these ten and you will never again experience a historic city as mere atmosphere. Because you will be able to read it.

Why cities are documents

The medieval and early modern city was not ‘planned’ in the modern sense. Back then there was no urban design office, zoning board, or traffic consultants. What there was: a hierarchy of authorities, each with a claim on space, and expressing that claim in stone.

The Church claimed the highest ground and the tallest structure. The guild corporations claimed the main square and the streets feeding it. The civic government claimed a position of oversight: it was literally elevated above commerce, but below God. The merchant class clustered their warehouses along the water.

The poor were pushed to the periphery, which is also why suburbs in European cities are recent and unlovely: the original ‘suburbs’ were where you went when the city did not want you.

Every positioning was an argument. Every building said: this is who we are, this is what we are worth, this is where we stand in the order of things.

When you learn to read these arguments, a city stops being just an atmosphere and starts being a book written in stone across five or six centuries by people who were convinced that physical space should make the social order visible.

But the moderns dismantled this. They did it in two moves: First, industrial urbanisation in the 19th century threw up housing at speed with no logic except density.

Then 20th-century planning ideology, convinced that the old city was irrational, demolished and rationalised what remained. Le Corbusier called the winding medieval street a ‘donkey path.’ He wanted to replace it with straight lines and rational blocks. In several European cities, he got his wish.

The 10 things to look for…

1. Where is the church?

Start here, this is the first question and it organises every other answer.

In every European city built before the Reformation the principal church occupies the highest ground available. Where the ground is flat, the tower compensates: it rises to claim vertical dominance the terrain denies.

In Utrecht, the Dom tower at 112 metres was the tallest structure in the Northern Netherlands for nearly four centuries. In Chartres, the cathedral is visible from thirty kilometres across flat farmland. But these were not accidents of taste. They symbolise theological arguments in stone.

The Church has always been the ordering institution of European civilisation. It predated the city in most cases: villages clustered around a chapel, towns around a parish, cities around a cathedral. The placement of the church was constitutional. Every city existed in the shadow of the Church, which meant under its protection, within its frame of meaning, oriented by its bells and liturgical calendar.

When you enter a historic European city, find the church first. First note its position. Then look for whether it occupies a hilltop, a raised platform, a clearing. And note how the surrounding streets feed into it: usually the widest, most processional streets point toward the cathedral or principal church. Those streets were not designed for traffic. They were designed for processions.

The procession is the key: Corpus Christi processions, Rogation Day processions, funeral processions, royal entries. The city was a stage for enacted community, and the processional route was its central axis. Where the streets fan out from the church, you are looking at procession geometry.

Questions to ask yourself: Is the church on elevated ground? Which streets lead directly to its main portal? Where does the processional route run?

2. The Market Square: commerce under God

The market square is always adjacent to the church. Usually within direct sight of the church tower, often sharing the same open space or connected by a short direct street.

Commerce in the medieval and early modern European city was not a secular activity. It operated under ecclesiastical oversight: under guild regulation, under oaths sworn before God. The market was held on feast days when the surplus population drawn into the city by the feast created a customer base for the fair.

The church bell regulated market hours, and its porch was where contracts were witnessed and disputes adjudicated.

When you find the market square, first look at its shape. It is almost never a pure rectangle. It evolved organically: a widening of the main street, a clearing before the church portal, a space that expanded as the market grew. The irregular polygon is the signature of organic development. The perfect grid is the signature of imposition: Roman foundation, post-war reconstruction, or 19th-century Haussmannisation.

Look at what surrounds the square. You will find: the town hall or weigh house (civic authority present at every transaction), the guild houses (corporate bodies with regulatory power), the principal church (divine sanction for commercial activity), and the main inn or hostelry (the market requires lodging for travelling merchants). All four authorities present in one space. The market square is not a shopping area, but a constitutional document.

Questions to ask yourself: What faces the market square? Where is the weigh house? Is the church portal visible from the centre of the square?

3. The Guild House and hierarchy of trades

The guilds were the corporations of pre-industrial Europe. Regulatory bodies with legal authority over an entire trade. To work as a baker, a butcher, a weaver, a goldsmith, a surgeon in a European city before 1800, you needed guild membership. The guild set standards, controlled prices, trained apprentices, and cared for its sick and elderly members. It was simultaneously a trade union, a quality authority, a welfare state, and a religious confraternity.

Their buildings reflect this authority:

The most powerful guilds were typically drapers, goldsmiths, and butchers, whose wealth was greatest. Often built on the market square itself or on its primary approach street. Lesser guilds occupied side streets feeding into the square. The spatial hierarchy of guild houses maps the economic hierarchy of the city’s trades with remarkable precision.

In Bruges, the Poortersloge and the guild houses of the Tanners, the Boatmen, and the Fishmongers are all positioned within a compact area around the Burg and the Market. The entire commercial and civic life of the city legible within a ten-minute walk.

In Antwerp, the guildhalls on the Grote Markt are ranked by the size of their facades. The more prosperous the guild, the wider the building, because the street front was commercial property and width was wealth.

When you look for guild houses, look at their signature: stepped or curved gable (Flemish and Dutch cities), ground-floor arcade for covered trading, a guild emblem carved above the entrance. You will see scissors for tailors, a boot for cobblers, scales for merchants, a caduceus or ‘gaper’ for apothecaries.

Many still survive as restaurants or municipal offices with their emblems intact and unread.

Questions to ask yourself: Which guild houses still stand? Which face the square directly versus a side street? What trade emblems survive above the doors?

4. The Town Hall: civic authority and its limits

The town hall was never the highest building, was never on the highest ground. This is deliberate.

The town hall represents civic authority. The self-governing merchant class that won, through charters extracted from feudal lords between the 11th and 14th centuries, the right to manage their own affairs.

That right was real and hard-won. But it operated within a frame set by the Church, and the positioning of the town hall acknowledges this.

In most historic European cities, the town hall faces the market square and stands beside or opposite the principal church. It is civic authority and divine authority in dialogue, neither subordinate to the other in the daily business of the square, but the church tower always rising above the town hall roof.

The vertical hierarchy is maintained even when the horizontal arrangement suggests equality.

The town hall facade is the civic face of the city. The medieval town hall typically features: an open arcade at ground level (the ground floor was public space, the loggia was for public announcements, judgment, and market oversight), a great hall above for council meetings and banquets, a belfry or tower for the civic bell (which rang for emergencies, for curfew, and for market opening. This bell was distinct from the church bell, which rang for the hours). Two belfries, of two authorities, governing two rhythms of daily life.

Post-Reformation town halls often dropped this arcade, since the civic authority no longer needed to perform its accessibility in the same way. The Dutch Golden Age town hall is typically a closed block, its authority expressed through classical proportion rather than open invitation. That shift from arcade to closed facade tracks the shift from late-medieval civic culture to early modern sovereign state.

Questions to ask yourself: Does the town hall have an open arcade? Where does the civic belfry sit relative to the church tower? What story does the town hall facade tell about when it was built and under what ideology?

5. Water, the Engine of the medieval city

Every significant European city before the railway was a water city. Not necessarily a port, but positioned on, or connected to, navigable water. Rivers, canals, harbours. Water was infrastructure before infrastructure existed as a concept.

Look at where the water runs and how the city oriented itself to it.

In a river city, the oldest settlement is typically on the high bank: defensible, above flood level, and commerce occupied the lower bank or the riverbank itself. The wharf was the economic engine: goods arrived by water, were unloaded onto the wharf, weighed at the weigh house, stored in the warehouses behind, and moved into the market. The whole sequence is usually still legible in the urban fabric even when the water trade is long gone.

In canal cities, like Amsterdam, Utrecht, Bruges, or Ghent, the canals are not decorative. They were the road network. Every canal has a loading quay, and the buildings facing the canal typically have upper-floor hoist beams projecting over the water.

You can still see them, often preserved as hooks or beams even on buildings that have been converted to apartments. The narrow gables of Amsterdam canal houses were not an aesthetic choice, but a tax response. Property was taxed by street frontage width, so buildings grew tall and narrow, and goods entered through the top rather than the front.

Questions to ask yourself: Where is the nearest navigable water? Which buildings face it? Where are the warehouse districts? Can you see hoist beams on the upper floors?

6. Street widths and the logic of movement

In a city that grew organically before motor vehicles, street width encodes purpose.

The widest streets are processional: they connect the city gate to the cathedral portal, or the cathedral to the market square. They were not wide for traffic. They were wide for organised movement of people in community: the Corpus Christi procession, the royal entry, the funeral cortège of a bishop or a wealthy merchant who had paid for a public ceremony.

Secondary streets: one cart-width, two pedestrians passing comfortably are commercial. They connect the market square to the residential neighbourhoods, and their rhythm is the rhythm of daily trade: the baker, the tailor, the cobbler, whose customers lived a short walk away.

Lanes and alleys: single file, dark at noon, are residential back-access and servant routes. Every large house in a historic city has a back lane, usually with a different name from the front street. The front street was public and performative. The lane was functional and private.

Street names encode this too. In Dutch cities: Grote Marktstraat (main market street), Korte and Lange versions of streets (short and long arms of the same route), Steeg (lane, servant access), Dwarsstraat (cross street, secondary). The naming system is a map of function.

Questions to ask yourself: Which streets are wide enough for processions? Which streets connect the church to the market? Where do the lanes run, and where do they lead?

7. The position of the hospital and the almshouse

Before the welfare state, charitable care was Catholic infrastructure. Hospitals — the word comes from hospes, the Latin for guest — were founded and run by religious orders. The founding orders of European hospital networks include the Augustinians (the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, founded 651 AD, the oldest continuously operating hospital in the world), the Alexians, the Brothers of Charity, the Beguines.

The position of the hospital and almshouse in a historic city is consistently on the city’s periphery… but a specific kind of periphery. Close enough to the centre to receive the sick from across the city. Adjacent to a watercourse, for sanitation.

Near a city gate, so travellers who fell ill on the road could reach care before entering the city proper. And always with a chapel at its centre, because the hospital was not merely a medical institution, but a house of the dying, where the preparation for death was as important as the treatment of the body.

The Beguinages (Dutch: Begijnen) were communities of lay religious women who ran schools and hospitals. Their communities are some of the most intact medieval urban complexes surviving in Northern Europe.

The Bruges Beguinage, founded 1245, is still occupied by Benedictine nuns. The Amsterdam Begijnhof, founded around 1346, is still a residential enclosure, serviced by the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament. Both are positioned at the city’s historic edge, adjacent to water, around a central chapel. The form is entirely legible once you know what you’re reading.

Questions to ask yourself: Where was the historic hospital? Is there a Beguinage? What religious order founded it, and does the chapel survive?

8. The defensive layer: Walls, gates, and what Replaced them

Every European city of significance was walled. The wall was not primarily military, but mostly civic. To be within the walls was to be a citizen; to be outside it meant you were a peasant, a traveller, a Jew, or leper. The gate was the customs point, the toll point, the identity checkpoint. You were from somewhere when you passed through a gate.

Most European city walls were demolished in the 19th century by civic engineers who needed the land for boulevards and railways. Vienna’s Ringstrasse is built on the footprint of the demolished walls and glacis. Paris’s grands boulevards replace the old fortifications. Amsterdam’s major ring roads follow the lines of demolished 17th-century walls.

What often remains are the gates: the most monumental points of the wall, too large and too embedded in the street network to remove easily. So… look for the surviving gates, and you have the outline of the historic city. The gates tell you the size of the medieval city, its cardinal directions, and which approach roads mattered enough to warrant monumental treatment.

The area immediately outside the historic gate is always interesting. It was the suburb in the original sense: the space below (sub) the city (urbs), where activities too noisy, too smelly, or too dangerous for the city were tolerated. Tanneries, slaughterhouses, smithies, brothels, and leper hospitals were there. The first thing past the gate was always the place the city did not want to look at directly.

Questions to ask yourself: Which city gates survive? Can you trace the wall line on a map? What was the historic suburb outside each gate?

You now see churches, markets, guilds, hospitals, and gates. You understand how authority, charity, commerce, and civic identity are written in space.

Yet this is only part of the story. The hidden layer that binds all these elements — the logic that structures the medieval city as a moral and social organism — is still unread. It is the secret almost no visitor notices, and it changes everything about how you move through and understand the city.

Read more

The site of the Miracle that founded Amsterdam is now a haunted house.

A UK entertainment company called Merlin runs it. Tourists pay to be frightened in a building put up in 1912, on the spot where, in 1345, a consecrated Host survived the fire and returned back three times to Ysbrand Dommer.

The original chapel stood there for five hundred and sixty one years. In 1908, the Protestants who owned it demolished it to prevent a Catholic revival.

And gave us a haunted house instead.

Every year in mid March, several thousand people walk through Amsterdam in the middle of the night.

They walk in silence. No prayers aloud, no hymns, no banners. They pass coffee shops, clubs, tourists, and the red lit windows, following a route kept alive across three centuries by women who memorised it.

Most people in the city do not notice.

This is the Stille Omgang, the Silent Walk.

It began as a Corpus Christi procession after a miracle in 1345. When Amsterdam became Protestant in 1578, it was banned. For two hundred and thirty three years, public Catholic worship was forbidden.

But the route remained.

What happened on the night of 15 March 1345?

On the night of 15 March 1345, a man named Ysbrand Dommer lay dying in his house on Die Lane, now the Kalverstraat.

A priest gave him the last rites and the consecrated Host.

He could not keep it down, and vomited. So his nurse threw the Host into the flames. But the next morning, the Host lay in the hearth, intact and unburned.

She reached into the fire and took it out without harm.

She tolt the priest, and he carried it to St. Nicholas Church. The next day it had returned to the Ysbrand’s house. This happened twice more.

On the fourth attempt, the Host was carried through the streets in procession.

Within weeks, the miracle was recognised. Pilgrims began to arrive from across Europe. By 1347, a chapel stood over the hearth where it had happened.

Amsterdam was still a small settlement. But this Miracle changed its course.

Each March, the Miracle was marked with a public procession. Pilgrims came hoping to be healed. They slept in dormitories and wore badges to show they had made the journey.

The city understood itself through this.

But that ended in 1578….

The Alteration of 26 May 1578

Catholic clergy were expelled. Public worship was banned. The chapel passed into Protestant hands. The monstrance disappeared.

The procession stopped. But it was not forgotten. Pious women kept it.

In the seventeenth century, a woman named Weyntje Elia dictated the route she had followed as a little girl. Her account was printed in 1737, so the path survived in writing.

Catholic worship continued in hidden churches across the city. Illegal, but allowed if unseen. For more than two centuries, the procession could not take place.

But it remained in the memory.

Catholics could worship, but not in public. Processions were illegal. But walking was not.

Weyntje’s account was formally printed in 1737 in the Historie van het Mirakel van Amsterdam. This publication caught the attention of Cornelia Beerthuls, a wealthy and devout Catholic woman.

Inspired by the restored knowledge of the original route, she used her resources to revitalize the devotion and strengthen the Begijnhof’s foundation.

This pious foundation remains the legal and spiritual caretaker of the Begijnhof today, ensuring it remains one of the few places in Amsterdam where the medieval spirit of the Miracle is still palpable.

The hidden churches of Amsterdam, the ‘schuilkerken’, preserved the Mass behind ordinary house facades. Nearly two dozen officially illegal Catholic congregations flourished in Amsterdam in the Republic’s time.

For two hundred and thirty-three years, there was no procession. But the Protestants had not abolished the memory, only made it impossible to express publically.

The loophole and revival of 1881

In 1881, a group of men walked the old route in silence, without banners or clergy, ending with Mass at the Begijnhof.

They found a way to continue. And by the early twentieth century, thousands joined them.

The response came in 1908….

The Protestants response

In 1908, the Protestant church fathers decided to consolidate the space and sell off the surrounding land to generate income. The building was demolished. At that period the Catholic Church was enjoying a surge in popularity and the Protestants were determined not to ‘give them back their church grounds.’

Not because it was unsafe, but because the revived procession was drawing Catholics back. The owners chose to remove it rather than see it reclaimed.

Parts of the chapel are still to be found in the Enge Kapelsteeg and on the roof of De Papegaai (a secret chapel) in the Kalverstraat.

A few fragments came to rest at the Frankendael estate in the Watergraafsmeer. Wikipedia The bones of the Heilige Stede are scattered across the city in pieces, invisible to anyone who does not know.

The real problem: secularisation

The Stille Omgang survived the demolition of its destination. It kept growing every year…

Then came the 1960s…

In 1965, Amsterdam provocateurs staged a ‘happening’ that mocked the walkers during the Stille Omgang with a theatrical fire. The organisers adapted, and ecumenical gestures toward local Protestants followed in the 1990s.

The walk’s official materials began describing it as open to ‘all Christians’, and eventually to anyone who wished to participate, whatever their beliefs. Each year a special intention is chosen ‘reflecting a theme current in modern life.’

By 2016, participation had fallen. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, with the restart in 2023, numbers fell back to ~2,000.

The procession ban was finally lifted in 1983. Catholics could have walked with clergy and banners in full public procession for the first time in four centuries. But they did not. The Stille Omgang continued as it was: silent, without religious insignia, without the monstrance raised. A form preserved under persecution that continued to suppress itself long after the persecution ended.

This is what secularisation does. It does not always forbid, but makes you forget why you were doing what you were doing, until only the form remains and the purpose has drained away.

What was really lost

The silence of the Stille Omgang was not a spiritual preference. It was the shape that persecution gave to the devotion. Catholics walked without speaking because speaking would have given authorities grounds to arrest them. The silence was a constraint imposed by Protestant legal prohibition. It was the only form available.

When that was forgotten, when the silence became simply the ‘style’ of the walk, a feature making it accessible to ‘people of all faiths’, the walk became something else entirely. A night stroll with vaguely spiritual overtones, available to anyone, meaning anything, asking nothing.

Around two thousand people still walk the Kalverstraat between 10PM and 1AM in March. In one of the most secular cities in Europe.

You can demolish a chapel, rename it, and sell tickets to it.

But people who remember will still come back.

Where to stand

The Stille Omgang happens this Saturday 21 March-Sunday 22 March: So walk it!

The route begins at the Begijnhofkapel and follows the medieval pilgrimage path through the heart of the old city.

There is a Traditional Latin Mass at the Saint Agnes Church at 8 PM. Do not go to a Novus Ordo Mass. The faith of the pious men women who kept this tradition alive was on the ancient Catholic faith, not the 1960s ecumenist version.

Walk it as the Catholics of 1881 walked it: following a route kept alive by the stubbornness of women across three centuries of prohibition, in honour of Our Lord refusing to let a consecrated Host be burned in 1345.

The modern world converts sacred ground into entertainment. It turns Catholic miracle sites into haunted houses, pilgrimage routes into shopping streets, the Heiligeweg into a retail zone. It does this because it has no other category for the sacred. It cannot destroy it, only misidentify it.

Pass the place where the chapel stood, and pass the building that replaced it.

The ground has not changed, but the city has.

You can demolish our chapels, rename them, and sell tickets to them.

But we will still come back.

Tradition does not stop.

-Robbert

Most of what surrounds you was built by people with a framework you were never given.

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This week I watched a video of Goatis about influencer Samuel Onuha. It was very entertaining, but not the first time I saw this guy. Since the Onuha brothers are well-known in the online entrepreneur space.

The guy, Samuel Onuha, has Nigerian, and a Dutch mother. He grew up in The Netherlands, yet they divorced when he was 5. And dropped out at 18 years old.

He built a Shopify store from his bedroom, and by 25 had a reported net worth of $50 million, a Palm Jumeirah mansion, and a Rolls-Royce Cullinan worth $600,000. He documented all of it on Instagram for 600,000 followers.

Sounds like quite a standard rags to riches story, and while I highly doubt the net worth, he definitely has more numbers in his bank account than others.

This essay is about the lie at the center of modern wealth: that money buys sovereignty. It buys a more expensive version of the same captivity. The skybox and the couch are the same chair.

Recently he (Samuel) posted a video of describing a €1.5 million day. Boxing tickets at €4,000 per seat. Hotel suites, bottle service and celebrities.

When I watched it I felt one thing: recognition.

It was wat Juvenal wrote it in 100 AD: the panem et circenses, bread and circuses. The formula Roman satirists used to describe how emperors kept a population pacified: fed, entertained, and fundamentally captive. This is what Goatis talks about in his video as well.

Onuha paid €4,000 for a ringside seat. The man watching on his phone saw the same and paid nothing. Eventhough Onuha has a X million dollar net worth, het still lives the same as a peasant, just a bit more premium.

What sovereignty actually looks like

Before the enclosures, an English peasant in 1500 had something Samuel Onuha does not: genuine physical sovereignty over his subsistence. In that sense a peasant even had more freedom than Onuha has.

He had common rights: jus compascui, the right to graze animals on shared land. Jus piscendi, the right to fish. Jus venandi in certain forests, the right to hunt.

These were not lordly gifts, but ancient customary rights, embedded in English common law before Magna Carta. And many countries in Europe had similar systems.

A man who could graze two cows, fish the river, gather wood, and hunt rabbit on common land was not dependent on the cash economy for survival. He could, in a meaningful sense, and tell his employer to go to hell.

Between 1604 and 1760, Parliament passed over 5,200 Enclosure Acts. Common land was privatised, forests were fenced, and fishing rights passed to landed gentry.

The peasant who had grazed his animals on the common since his grandfather’s time suddenly became a trespasser. By 1850, over 6.8 million acres of English common land had transferred to private hands.

Wage an factory work replaced it. We became dependent on the cash economy for every calorie.

The man who had been functionally free: able to feed, clothe, and heat himself from land he had customary right to use became a worker: A consumer, and spectator of his own existence.

To me this is the original sin of modern civilisation. And nobody in a Dubai skybox is discussing it.

The Roman parallel is very precise. Juvenal was not describing mere entertainment in his Satires, but the mechanism by which Roman plebs: once landholding citizens with genuine political and economic power, were pacified after that power was stripped.

The grain dole (annona) replaced their farm. And the games (ludi) replaced genuine contest. The citizen became a consumer. A man who once voted, farmed, and fought became a spectator eating subsidised bread while professionals performed violence on his behalf.

And the games themselves deserve examination too. The Roman munus: the gladiatorial contest was not entertainment originally.

It was a funeral rite, first recorded in 264 BC, offered by Decimus Junius Brutus Scaeva at his father’s funeral. Two pairs of slaves fought to the death to honor the dead. The blood fed the spirit of the deceased. It was done as a ritual, not a spectacle.

But by the time of Augustus, it had become the Colosseum with 50,000 seats, professional fighters, scheduled seasons, and imperial sponsorship.

It had become circus. And the Roman citizen, once a farmer-soldier acquainted with real physical struggle, sat eating emperor-provided bread while watching men he would never meet perform combat he would never experience.

Samuel Onuha’s €4,000 ringside seat is nothing else than the front row of the Colosseum.

The Modern Version

Modern sport continues what Rome started.

Whether it is boxing, football, or basketball. All are simulations of genuine physical contest, stripped of real stakes and packaged for consumption. A man who hunts does not need to watch hunting. A man who fights does not need to pay for the privilege of watching others fight. Spectator sport exists because the population has been removed from genuine physical contest and requires a managed substitute.

The numbers confirm it. The global sports industry was worth $512 billion in 2023. The Premier League alone generated £6.8 billion in the 2022–23 season. Ajax’s annual revenue runs approximately €180 million. These are not athletic institutions, but entertainment businesses that use athletic performance as content. The players are their employees, the fans are consumers. And the guy in the €4,000 front row seat is a higher-margin peasant than the man on the backseat.

What Onuha purchased is not access to something real, but proximity to a performance.

The gladiator bleeds, the emperor’s guest applaud. But the distance between them: social, experiential, existential, is absolute, regardless of how close the seat sits to the ring.

This is what modern wealth actually buys. It is not sovereignty, but better proximity to spectacle. A hotel suite instead of the hostel. A skybox instead of the standing section.

A private jet instead of economy class. The activities are always identical: flying somewhere to watch something, eating food someone else prepared, sleeping in a room you do nit own, returning home to a screen.

The cash economy has tiered the experience. Onuha bought the premium tier, but is still inside the ‘matrix’.

What money cannot buy

Onuha’s wealth is, by his own accounting, largely imaginary. It is Shopify revenue, Dropshipping margins, Instagram influence monetised through a mentorship program called Millionaire Commerce. A program where he sells the promise of replication.

His asset base is Dubai properties, a clothing brand, and social following. None of this produces food or warmth. And none of it can sustain him 30 days if the cash economy stopped functioning.

A medieval peasant in 1450 had a more durable existence. He knew which mushrooms grew in which part of the forest in October. He knew the fish runs on his river. He knew how to slaughter a pig in November and cure it for winter: a practice so universal it gave us the word carnival, from carne vale, farewell to meat before Lent’s fast.

He was embedded in a specific place, in specific seasons, with knowledge that was genuinely his and could not be erased by a market correction.

His knowledge is mostly gone, and is not reformed, digitised, or improved upon. The enclosures took the land. The industrial revolution took the craft. And the supermarket erased the last remnant of genuine subsistence. Farmers are completely dependent upon subsidies now.

Wages replaced it, and wages require an employer, and an employer requires that you show up, perform, and consume on schedule.

Onuha shows up on Instagram, performs wealth, and consumes at the premium tier. He is, in every meaningful sense, a successful serf. One whose feudal obligation runs not to a lord but to an algorithm, an audience, and a cash economy he cannot exit any more than the man watching his videos hoping to replicate him.

His €1.5 million day proves it. A genuinely free man is one with land, animals, and the knowledge to feed himself from what the earth produces. He has no need for a €4,000 ringside seat. He had a real contest in his life, and does not need to buy proximity to someone else’s.

What should have been understood

The Onuha story is not necessarily a failure of taste. It is not that he is nouveau riche, lacks refinement, or spends on the wrong things. These critiques miss the point, and most people who make such accusations would spend the same money more quietly on identically stupid activities.

The critique is rather structural. The entire framework within which his wealth operates is a closed system. You can move up the tiers: from coach to business class, standing section to skybox, hostel to Burj Al Arab, but you cannot exit through wealth alone. Onuha has optimised his position within modern slavery. But that is not freedom. It is successful captivity.

Juvenal grasped this in 100 AD. The peasants displaced by the Enclosure Acts grasped it viscerally as their commons were fenced and customary rights extinguished by Parliamentary decree. What they lost was not sentiment, but their sovereignty. Which was their ability to subsist outside the cash economy, the ability to say no.

That ability does not cost €1.5 million. It cannot be purchased within the current system at any price. It requires land, knowledge, and the willingness to live close to the ground. You cannot order that from a Shopify store, nor be taught in a mentorship program, and will not fit in a skybox.

The ringside seat might be very close to the ring, but is still just a seat.

—Robbert

Further reading:

• Juvenal, Satires (c. 100 AD)

• E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)

• Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)

• Robert Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (1992)

• Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

• Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (1979)

You know the feeling…

Standing on the platform at your local train station, watching the departure board flicker from 5 minutes delayed to 10 minutes to ‘no information available.’ The crowd thickens. People check their phones, calculating if they will make their connection, or if they will be late to work.

Then: ‘The 7:32 service has been cancelled. Next train departs at 8:02.’

While annoyed, nobody is surprised, this has become normal. NS (Dutch Railways) will send an automated apology in their app. And their executives (ex-politicians) will still get their bonuses for operational improvements.

Meanwhile, in 1632, boats departed Amsterdam for Haarlem on the hour, every hour, arriving when the timetable promised. It was Europe’s first scheduled public transport system, pulled by horses, yet more reliable than anything you will use today.

If you boarded at 10:00, you arrived before 11:00. You could not check your phone, nor get an automated notification.

And contrary to nowadays, this system ran profitably for 200 years without any subsidies.

What changed was who runs the system and what they optimise for.

This essay is about what Dutch engineering once was, how it actually worked, and why modern infrastructure is worse despite appearing more advanced.

A system that worked

By 1665, the trekvaart network spanned 415 kilometres of engineered canals connecting every major city of Holland. A boat towed by one horse at a consistent speed.

The men who built this understood they were building a system, not managing a business.

The canal depth was standardised across the entire network. The locks were positioned at calculated intervals. The towpaths were maintained to exact specifications. The horses bred specifically for 8-hour towing shifts. And the boats built to identical dimensions.

Change one variable and you had to recalculate the entire network.

The engineers who designed this had spent decades working on canals, not KPIs. They understood water flow from digging drainage ditches. Understood boat construction from building them. Knew horse capabilities from breeding and training them. And how weather affected operations because the Trekvaart operated in all weather conditions.

Their knowledge was embodied, since they had done the work.

The system worked for 200 years because it was made by people who understood how the pieces actually functioned together, not how they looked in theory.

What runs public transport now

Modern public transport has computer-controlled switches, real-time tracking, and electronic scheduling optimised to the minute. Centuries of additional technology, and billions in infrastructure investment.

Still: trains and buses are ALWAYS late.

Which is not a technology problem, but a management choice.

The Dutch Railways are run by Wouter Koolmees, who became CEO in November 2022.

His career before that…

• Minister of Social Affairs and Employment from 2017 to 2022

• Member of the House of Representatives from 2010 to 2017, serving as D66’s financial spokesman.

• Worked at the Ministry of Finance as head of budget policy.

An entire career spent in government offices, parliament, and ministries. Optimising budgets, negotiating coalition agreements, reforming pension systems, and managing policy portfolios.

He has never operated a train. Nor maintained rail infrastructure, nor worked a single day in its operations. He may have taken the train, but that is all.

He does have a degree in economics from Utrecht University, and is in a network of neoliberal circlejerkers, who gave him this job.

This is what managerialism produces: circlejerks selected for their ability to manage abstract systems, not for their understanding of what the average employee actually does.

But Koolmees is not an outlier, rather the model of pseudo-government companies like NS / Dutch Railways.

His predecessor as CEO was Marjan Rintel, who left in 2022 to become CEO of KLM (also terribly managed) Before NS, she worked at Achmea insurance, PostNL, and ABN AMRO.

A career moving between executive positions in completely unrelated industries. Insurance, postal service, banking, railways, airlines. The actual operations do not seem to matter, since management is management (what they think).

Before Rintel was Roger van Boxtel, CEO from 2014 to 2020. Before NS, he was CEO of Menzis health insurance. Before that, Minister of Urban Policy and Integration. Before that, State Secretary for Education. A politician who became an insurance executive who became a railway CEO.

None of these people built the expertise to run a railway by working in railways. They built the expertise to manage organisations by moving between executive positions in unrelated fields.

They are professional LinkedIN NPC’s: talking about work is more important than how the actual work.

Who destroyed this

Let us go back to the root cause: the guild system being destroyed by force.

Napoleon forced the abolition of Dutch guilds between 1795 and 1818. The revolutionary governments declared them ‘medieval monopolies’ that ‘restricted free trade.’

Their explicit goal: eliminate craft organisations to liberate labor.

The apprenticeships ended, and standards disappeared. The knowledge of how soil feels at 15 metres, which timber comes from which forest, how to identify foundation failure none of this was in books because it could not be. It lived in the hands of masters who corrected apprentices through years of practice.

A type of knowledge that died with the last guild masters. Knowledge we only retroactively ‘discover’ now.

Instead of guilds we have engineering schools teaching abstract principles. Soil mechanics as equations. Load calculations as formulas.

A modern civil engineer can calculate theoretical load capacity. But cannot feel when a pole hits sand. He cannot identify weak timber by grain pattern. He was never taught these things, because he will likely never talk to the men constructing his ideas.

The real collapse came later. James Burnham spoke a lot on this.

In the 1950s, and beyond, a political class of neoliberal technocrats convinced that markets could optimise everything, and dismantled what remained of our institutional competence. (This revolution already happened earlier in the USA.)

They privatised infrastructure, and introduced ‘competitive tendering’. People with skills were replaced with consultants, experience with Excel sheets, and standards with KPIs.

Dutch Railways / NS today is run by Wouter Koolmees, a D66 career politician. He has never built, maintained or operated anything.

This is what runs modern infrastructure now: people who believe systems can be managed like balance sheets, who think reliability is a metric to optimise, and assume expertise is whatever came out of their university textbooks.

The men who built the trekvaart would have been master canal engineers with decades of practical experience. The men who drove foundation poles were guild craftsmen who had apprenticed for seven years. The men who built windmills were millwrights who inherited knowledge spanning generations.

The men running public transport operations are technocrats who think punctuality is like Russian Roulette: it either happens, or it does not.

What we lost

We cannot rebuild the trekvaart, because the ethos that led men to design integrated transport systems like these is gone.

Modern systems pretend to be better… Not objectively, but optimised for a quarterly return, or a bonus for board members, not generational durability.

Public transport is doomed to have subsidies, because for some magic reason we cannot have profitable and reliable transport like Japan has. So the managerial midwest optimise vanity metrics instead of whether the system works. Thought out by people who have never built anything, nor ever will.

Your train might arrive eventually, overcrowded and late. And you pay €10,- for a service that would have been shameful in 1732. The CEO receives bonuses for ‘operational efficiency’ and awards for his service.

We have accepted this incompetence to be normal.

Because the people who knew how to build things that actually work are either dead, underpaid, or left the industry a long time ago.

The people who actively kill knowledge are now in charge.

—Robbert

Does your heel lift slightly with each step? Does the leather crease heavily across the top of your foot? Do you feel pressure where the shoe meets your ankle?

If you answered yes to any of these… your shoes do not fit!

This is why they look shabby after 6 months.
Why your feet hurt after a full day.

And why most think ‘dress shoes are just uncomfortable.’

They are not, but yours are…

What died with Hermans Schoenen

In 1906, two sisters in Utrecht could not find decent shoes anywhere in the city. Both wore size a 44, yet: the shops had nothing…

So they opened Hermans Schoenen…

And for 100+ years, it survived by solving one problem: fitting shoes that actually matched how feet were shaped.

Lawyers buying Crockett & Jones loafers and resoling them five times because they understand cost-per-wear. Architects owning the same Edward Green oxfords since 1987. Doctors knowing exactly why they preferred the Crockett & Jones 348 last over an Alden Barrie…

We fitted based on actual foot shape.
Not vanity sizing, or what happened to be in stock.

We measured their instep height, width at the ball, heel grip. And knew which English lasts ran narrow, which Italian makers built for low insteps, and what brands accommodated wide feet.

When the parent company collapsed in 2019, a bankruptcy buyer took over.

He filled the shop with flashy brands for aspirational buyers instead of proper shoes for the clients who knew what they were buying.

Within months, ~117 years of knowledge disappeared.

But this knowledge should not die entirely…

I spent 2 years at Hermans. And worked at Burberry, Zegna, Edward Green, and Zwartjes van 1883.

Thousands of shoes fitted across every price point and construction method.

And saw men who used to buy four pairs of expensive shoes in 2 years because they kept buying the wrong last for their foot shape.

Not because their shoe was of poor quality.
But because the fit was wrong.

No one ever told them about their foot shape. They had a high instep in a shoe built for average volume. Too wide feet forced into narrow lasts. Destroyed heels, excessive creasing, and shoes that looked shabby after months.

While other men bought €600 shoes that lasted 15 years because someone finally fitted them properly.

The retail infrastructure that taught this is gone:
Almost all the shops are bankrupt or closed…
The knowledgeable staff retired…

Their standards remain.

The construction methods that produce durability are the same as they were 50 years ago. The leather quality markers have not changed. The fit principles are identical.

Someone just needs to teach them again…

Here’s what you actually need to know…

4 things separate men who own good shoes from men who waste money every two years:

1. Your foot shape determines which shoes will physically work

You have an instep height: low, normal, or high.
You have a width: narrow, medium, wide, or extra-wide.
You have a foot length that varies by brand, by country, by individual model within the same brand.

95% men are wearing the wrong size. Not because they were measured incorrectly, but because size means nothing without understanding foot shape.

A €1,200 shoe in the wrong last will destroy itself in months.

2. You can see quality in 30 seconds once you know what to look for

Full-grain calfskin versus corrected grain. Goodyear welt versus Blake stitch versus cemented construction. These are not preferences. They are different materials and construction methods with different durability, ageing properties, and repairability.

You can verify construction quality in three minutes without asking the salesperson anything.

3. Shoes set the formality floor for your entire outfit

You can dress down a suit with casual shoes. You cannot dress up jeans with formal shoes. The shoes determine the lowest acceptable formality level of everything you wear.

This is why men in badly-fitted oxfords and jeans look confused. The shoes say boardroom, the trousers say weekend. The contradiction creates visual dissonance.

4. Good shoes require less maintenance than cheap shoes, not more

A properly constructed Goodyear welted shoe needs shoe trees, occasional brushing, and cream every few months. That is all.

The maintenance routine is 5 minutes per wear. A shoe maintained this way lasts 15 to 20 years.

I wrote all the knowledge down…

The Leusink Shoe Buying Guide is everything I learned at Hermans, Burberry, Zegna, Edward Green, and Zwartjes van 1883.

It is not a shopping list. Not brand recommendations based on affiliate links. And also not a ‘10 shoes every man should own.”

It is the fitting system luxury shoe stores used for 100+ years…

Here is what you get…

Chapter 1: Determine your true size

• How to identify your instep type in 60 seconds (this determines which lasts will physically work for your foot)

• The width test that prevents €900 shoes from destroying themselves in 6 months

• Why ‘I am always a size 42’ is costing you hundreds of euros every year

• The fitting process we used at Hermans

• Which English lasts run narrow, which Italian makers build for low insteps, which American brands accommodate wide feet

Chapter 2: What to wear & when

• The formality hierarchy from black cap-toe oxfords to suede chukkas

• Why suede works with denim but shiny leather does not

• The three colour combination rules that prevent expensive mistakes

• Why double monks make most men look like they are trying too hard

• Complete visual guides showing which shoes work with which fabrics

Chapter 3: Spot quality in 3 minutes

• How to identify full-grain calfskin versus corrected grain by sight, touch, and smell

• The construction tells that expose cemented soles pretending to be Goodyear welted

• Why ‘genuine leather’ means nothing, and what to look for instead

• The 3-minute quality check you can do in any shop without asking the salesperson anything

• Photos showing the difference between proper and poor construction at identical price points

Chapter 4: Make them last decades

• The exact maintenance routine for dress shoes and suede shoes

• What products you actually need (and what you can skip)

• How often to do each step

• Common mistakes that damage shoes despite good intentions

• Why proper care makes a €600 shoe cheaper than a €150 shoe over ten years

Chapter 5: Where to actually spend your money

• Recommendations by budget tier: €300-450, €450-700, €700-1,500+

• Which brands offer genuine value at each tier

• Which makers accommodate specific foot shapes

• Where to find proper width fittings

• Sizing guidance across English, Italian, and American manufacturers

• Which brands to avoid regardless of marketing claims

What this costs…

Only €32 for the first 20 buyers…

Less than you will waste on your next poorly-fitted pair…

Because most men spend €300 every two years on shoes designed to fail.
This guide teaches you to buy once and resole for decades.

The maths can make you uncomfortable, because it reveals how much money you have already wasted on things designed to fall apart.

You can buy it here

(This guide is FREE for my paid Substack subscribers.)

Most men will never own good shoes. They will buy whatever is convenient, wear it until it falls apart, and repeat the cycle every few years.

You are reading this, so you will not be most men.

Dutch heritage is not just windmills and tulips. It is family businesses like Hermans opening a shop in 1906, because they refused to accept that quality shoes did not exist in their size.

It is 117 years of craftsmen who understood that fit mattered more than brand. An apprenticeship systems that taught store clerks to help customers find the right shoes, instead of maximising their commissions.

That world is gone…

But its knowledge remains.

And someone needs to preserve it.

BUY THE GUIDE - €32

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They asked €30 for it, but it was absolute shit. Meanwhile the restaurant has 4.3 stars on Google.

And this is not the first time I had food this bad in France: ‘Zhe’ Capital of Fine Food, they say.

The same France that loves to bash the Dutch about not having a food culture.

This essay is about how food became the last acceptable identity marker for people who have abandoned every other element of their culture. European civilisation built cathedrals, universities, legal systems, and global empires. But we cannot talk about any of that. So we pretend knowing the right spice blend makes you cultured.

The Retreat to the Plate

When someone says ‘I am Italian,’ what do they mean?

Ask someone in 1850, they would tell you about the Papal States or the Kingdom of Sardinia, about Latin Mass and feast days, about guild traditions and regional dialects. They might mention that Florence gave Europe the Renaissance, that Rome gave it law, that Venice controlled Mediterranean trade for centuries.

Ask the same 2026, and they will tell you about pasta, pizza, and no cappuccino after 11 AM.

Our faith became oppressive, language exclusionary, history problematic, and architecture elitist. So people retreat to the one identity marker nobody can criticise: food. It is a BuzzFeed type of identity.

Because food is safe, since it is consumable, it does not require you to believe anything. You cannot be called a bigot for preferring cassoulet. Food asks nothing of you except that you eat it.

Food can compensate for all the problems immigration is causing… since kebabs are good we should have more immigrants from kebab countries.

Multiculturalism is to blame for this weird obsession we got with food.

So nowadays Italian identity contracts to pastas. French identity contracts to wine and cheese. Dutch identity contracts to stamppot and cheese. These become the last things you are allowed to defend.

And even then, half the time you apologise for them being bad, or not being as good as the ‘exotic’ foods.

What actually matters

You cannot raise children on recipes. And cannot build a marriage on knowing the difference between Neapolitan and Roman pizza. Nor can you maintain a civilisation on the basis of having good cheese.

But this is where we are.

Italian identity is not carbonara. It begins with Rome: roads, aqueducts, and legal foundations that still structure Europe. The Catholic Church preserving learning through collapse. Dante forging a shared Italian language. Guilds that built Florence. Maritime republics that dominated Mediterranean trade. Architectural tradition every Western city still imitates. Latin as the language of diplomacy, science, and theology for a millennium.

French identity is not cassoulet. It is Charlemagne and the Frankish inheritance. Cathedrals that took centuries to complete. A court language that became Europe’s diplomatic standard. Versailles, the Académie Française, and a Civil Code that reordered law across a continent. France understood itself as a civilisation with form, continuity, and authority.

Dutch identity is not dry bread with cheese. It is medieval art and a revolt against Spain. A trading empire built by the VOC. Painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer. Land reclaimed from the sea with engineering still studied worldwide.

The Netherlands is a civilisation shaped by trade, real tolerance (not the modern caricature), and technical mastery.

The food was a side effect of all of this. Efficient, meant to nourish the body while you built cathedrals and global trade networks. Not a masterpiece of culture itself.

We built empires, while others made chicken with rice. These are not equivalent.

What is dead

The civilisation that built our cathedrals is dead. Our faith that sustained it is gone. The apprenticeships that were a continuation are dead. The taverns that fed communities for generations are not there anymore. And the confidence that allowed us Europeans to say ‘this is ours and it matters’ is dead

What remains after all of that is food. And eventhough that is mostly garbage served to tourists that believe they are experiencing something authentic.

So tourists photograph our €12 Stroopwafel. And worship cuisines they do not understand. We pretend knowing spice blends makes us cosmopolitan. We reduce thousand year civilisations to their lunch options.

And we call this our culture.

-Robbert

Why does one have so much value whilst the other is a fart in the wind?

The University of Leiden digitised its medieval manuscript collection. You can scroll endlessly through densely written, meticulously neat pages. What strikes you is the regularity. Every s has the same curves. Every u the same thick belly. Often the colophon lists how many scribes worked on the manuscript. Sometimes two, often more.

Writing was never solitary. It was collaborative work towards a shared goal: preserve and transmit.

Around 3500 BCE, people in what is now Iraq developed cuneiform script. Thousands of years of script followed. Countless variations of hand, pen, paper.

Now you are happy to receive a birthday card your family bought online at Hallmark. Often they just message you with ‘condolences’ or ‘congratulations.’ Journalists never carry crumpled notepads. Coincidentally they also do not produce quality reports anymore. All clickbait and rage bait. Job boards never mention ‘writing.’ It is ‘typing.’

This essay is about how handwriting went from collaborative craft requiring years of training to something we actively avoid. How the ballpoint killed cursive without anyone noticing. How AI now writes our emails whilst we forget how to form letters. And why your ability to think clearly depends on occasionally picking up a pen.

The ballpoint pen killed cursive without anyone noticing.

Introduced commercially in the 1940s, the ballpoint used thicker ink than fountain pens. You had to press harder. Fatal for cursive, which requires light pressure and smooth movement.

Within a generation, cursive disappeared from everyday writing. Teachers stopped requiring it. Why bother when ballpoints made it uncomfortable?

What was lost was planning. When you write cursive, you envision the entire word before beginning. Typing allows letter-by-letter construction. You can change your mind mid-sentence. Less cognitive load, but also less cognitive benefit.

In America, cursive is still taught at private schools. Children who learn cursive stop spelling out words letter-by-letter sooner. Connected writing challenges the brain more, creating more neural pathways.

Typewriters arrived, and handwriting retreated. Businesses adopted them rapidly. Handwritten business correspondence became ‘unprofessional.’ The typewriter separated composition from handwriting. You could type as fast as you could think, but misspelling meant redoing the whole thing. You still needed foresight.

The typewriter did not kill handwriting entirely. Personal letters remained handwritten. Notes, journals, drafts—all still pen and paper. Professional work went to typewriters. Personal life stayed handwritten. That division held for decades.

Then everyone got a computer in their pocket. A glowing QWERTY keyboard that corrects spelling, predicts words, switches languages instantly. Email became the default for everything.

University students wave their hands after ten minutes of handwritten exam answers. Their hand muscles are not trained for sustained writing.

Now AI writes most emails. A pen icon sparkles in your inbox. Built-in AI generates messages so you type less. Soon writers will be ‘prompt writers.’

But AI works only in good hands. Meaning: people who write well themselves. The quality of the user and the quality of the output correspond.

Good writers pause. Between words, between sentences, especially between paragraphs. That pausing is thinking. They evaluate what they have written and plan how to continue. They polish constantly. Bad writers are satisfied quickly and adjust less.

The tool does not make you a better writer. The tool only amplifies what you already are.

Goethe’s Werther carved a poem for his beloved into rock. He had to think carefully about what he wanted to say and how it would fit on stone.

This is not nostalgia. This is not about aesthetics or ‘the joy of fountain pens’ or lifestyle-magazine drivel. This is about cognitive discipline enforced through physical limitation.

Handwriting forces planning because revision is costly. You cannot endlessly tinker. You cannot copy-paste your way to coherence. You must think before you write, structure before you begin, commit before you finish.

Digital writing removes constraint entirely. And the lack of handwriting nowadays produces worse thinking. Which is why people nowadays only talk in mind farts. Never having any inner dialogue.

What you need is a fountain pen… a pen that provides resistance. The ink flows only with correct pressure and angle. Too hard and you damage the nib. Too light and nothing appears. The paper itself resists… meaning: you learn to write with intention because your carelessness is visible.

Typing provides no resistance. Press any key, any way, and letters appear. Delete is instant. Revision is invisible. Change the font and it looks like you put in the effort.

AI has even removed the requirement to type. Soon we will not write at all. We will only describe what we want written and a software will generate it.

This will be the final separation of thinking from expression.

The Platform Handschriftontwikkeling (Dutch Handwriting Institute) got handwriting listed as intangible cultural heritage. But calling it ‘heritage’ admits defeat.

Handwriting is not dead… yet. Children still learn it, but with less rigour. Adults can still write by hand, though most avoid it. Pens are cheap, paper is everywhere, and the skill is simple to relearn.

But what is truly dying is the habit, the expectation of written letters: The standards we used to have.

And standards, once abandoned, are impossible to restore.

The ballpoint killed cursive in a generation, and less than a century later young adults cannot write for ten minutes without hand cramps.

This matters beyond handwriting. We can apply this to anything. Women that can barely cook anything from scratch. People can’t read long books anymore. Have no sustained attention. And avoid physical labour.

Yet… skill requiring years of practice and discomfort during learning.

Handwriting is the canary. If you cannot maintain something as forming letters with a pen, what discipline can you maintain?

The Platform Handschriftontwikkeling wants handwriting taught properly in schools. They want to require students to master penmanship before they graduate. And want cursive restored, fountain pens recommended, standards enforced.

Sadly… I know they will fail, because the momentum is against them.

But the discipline is not deemd pointless.

So pick up a pen. Write a letter. Keep a journal. Take some notes by hand. It will not be faster or more efficient. But that is the point: it is slower and harder.

Do not do it for ‘mindfulness’, ‘the joy of analogue.’ or because grandmother did it.

Constraint forces clarity. difficulty builds capacity. And what requires effort to create is proof you mastered it.

Grandma knew this without needing to articulate it. She wrote by hand because that was how you wrote. The permanence of ink on paper meant you thought before you committed.

Time to reclaim it.

-Robbert

Nansen wrote book about this experience: Paa ski over Grönland. It quickly became a bestseller across Europe. And order for Norwegian made skis flooded in from Austria, Germany and Italy. Within a decade, European aristocrats and Alpine farmers alike were strapping wooden planks to their feet to ski.

The skiing they discovered was not leisure activity, but a survival technology perfected over eight millennia.

The oldest known skis were found in Skellefteå, Sweden. Rock carvings near the White Sea from 2000 BCE show hunters on equal-length skis chasing game with bow and spear. And for the Sami, Finns, and Norwegians, skiing was how they moved through winter, hunted, survived.

Fast forward: by the 1890s, Alpine skiing had developed a dual character. On one hand, it was local farmers and innkeepers building rope tows for winter income. And on the other hand: European aristocracy with private ski guides, Swiss Retreats, and servants carrying their equipment up mountainsides.

Both classes existed in the same system. The farmer ran the lift and establishments, the aristocrat found his refuge. The mountain guides were locals, and his clients were Lords. A class hierarchy made functional.

Nowadays every account manager and Scrum master drives his Skoda to an apartment block that looks like a car park, to ride a heated six-person gondola, eat sloppy foods and calls it an ‘Authentic Alpine experience.’

This essay traces the origins of skiing from Arctic survival to mass-market consumption. And from Nansen’s Greenland crossing to Winterhalder’s waterwheel and the concrete brutalism of French purpose-built resorts. It shows how mass tourism destroyed both working-class authenticity and aristocratic experience.

Skiing as survival mechanism

The Sami used skis for reindeer herding, Finns for winter hunting, and Norwegian farmers for moving between isolated valleys when snow made roads impassable. One ski was long and smooth for gliding. The other shorter, covered in animal fur for grip whilst climbing.

It was not recreation, but teknē: Practical knowledge refined over millennia.

Fridtjof Nansen wrote about skiing as Norway’s most national and characteristic sport. No other nation practised skiing as Norwegians did.

When Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in 1911, he did it on Norwegian skis. His British rival Robert Scott used motor sledges and ponies. Scott sadly died on the return journey. But Amundsen survived, since he understood how the Sami survived.

The Norwegian military formalised specialised skiing units by 1747, when Danish-Norwegian battalions were formed. Documents on military exercises from 1767 include downhill racing in rough terrain, target practice whilst skiing, and three-kilometre cross-country with full pack.

The Innkeeper’s Waterwheel

While skiing became more popular all over Europe, it was a matter of time until the first ski lift was invented. The inventor Robert Winterhalder was not an aristocrat. He was a simple farmer and innkeeper from Schollach, Germany, who owned a grain mill.

In 1908, spa guests started arriving at his family’s Schneckenhof guesthouse. Wellness tourism was growing. Rich city-dwellers suffering from asthma and tuberculosis seeked the fresh mountain air. It was designated as a Luftkurort. Yet due to guest’s breathing problems, climbing slopes to ski or sled exhausted them.

So Winterhalder looked at his mill’s waterwheel and had a thought: I can use this to pull people uphill.

He rigged an endless rope with clamps, powered by the mill’s existing waterwheel. It was 280 metres long, and pulled guests 23 metres up the slope. He immediately patented his invention it in six countries: Germany, France, Austria, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Winterhalder’s lift was the world’s first ski lift.

It only operated for six years, because WWI shut it down in 1914. But he had proved the concept. It was local ingenuity, solving a local problem, and profit staying in his village.

Twenty-six years later, in 1934, Zürich engineer Ernst Constam built the first T-bar lift in Davos. It was faster, more comfortable, more profitable, but still completely out of reach for village cooperatives.

His T-bar attracted 70,000 skiers in its first year. The split had begun. Skiing transformed from a survival mechanism to a leisure activity

The Dual System: Farmers and Aristocrats

In the 1890s, Alpine skiing existed in two forms simultaneously.

1: Local and utilitarian.

Austrian pioneer Franz Reisch ordered his skis from Norway in 1892. No instructions were included, so he practised in Kitzbühel: walking uphill in seal-skin climbing skins, descending in straight lines, and falling to stop.

On 15 March 1893, he climbed Kitzbüheler Horn and skied down. It was the first Alpine ski descent ever recorded.

But Reisch was not pursuing a new sport, rather testing whether skis could replace (Austrian) snowshoes for winter work.

He was sold. And by 1900, local carpenters across Austria and Switzerland were making skis. Farmers found a way to earn income in the winter.

2: Aristocratic and exclusive

Grand Hotels and exclusive clubs in St. Moritz, Zermatt, Chamonix catered to European nobility, and industrial tycoons. They had private mountain guides, and servants carrying their equipment. Multi-week stays in heated luxury.

But even they faced elements. The 1920s photographs show them in wool and leather. Their stay at Suvretta House meant central heating, but the mountains did not have that.

For farmers skiing required physical toughness: climbing in animal skins, descending without edges or proper bindings, and enduring cold in poor clothing.

For aristocrats skiing required the same toughness plus capital. They had to pay a guide, to stay in comfort, yet still risked avalanches and frostbite.

Both required relationship to place. The farmer knew every slope, every forest path, and every dangerous cornice. The aristocrat returned yearly to the same place, same guide, and same slopes. Skiing meant knowing the place, not consuming ‘the experience.’

This dual system worked. The aristocrat did not romanticise peasant poverty. The farmer provided infrastructure and knowledge. The aristocrat provided capital and prestige. The village benefited from both, and both could live in harmony.

The Curse of Corporatisation

So… was it the Americans again?

Yes, it was. In 1936, Sun Valley, Idaho introduced the world’s first chairlift adapted from banana-loading equipment. This changed everything about skiing.

Since chairlifts require massive capital investment, engineering expertise, and corporate structures to execute. They were faster, more comfortable, more profitable than rope tows, yet impossible for villagers to build.

(Somehow the Austrians and Süd-Tyroleans managed to make the skilift industry a duopoly of Doppelmayr (AT/CH) and Leitner (IT) )

By the 1950s, American ski resorts were already publicly traded corporations. In 1962, Vail was founded by petroleum engineer Pete Seibert and uranium prospector Earl Eaton with $5 million in investor capital. They built a resort from nothing, adding a fake Bavarian village for aesthetic.

Europe followed. France commissioned purpose-built resorts in the 1960s: Les Arcs (1968), La Plagne (1961), Val Thorens (1972).

These were not organic villages, but concrete apartment blocks dropped onto mountainsides.

Architect Charlotte Perriand designed Les Arcs with brutalist ideology. It is a collective housing, with its socialist egalitarianism expressed in concrete. Concrete slabs, with zero relationship to Alpine culture.

I was in Les Deux Alpes, and it was exactly like this: you wake up, ski, then return to your nuclear bunker. Le Corbusier in an mountainous setting

Perriand rejected ‘nostalgic’ chalet design as bourgeois. She wanted to ‘democratise’ skiing by building modern resorts accessible to working-class Parisians.

The result are ghost villages with no year-round residents. No cute Alpine churches, or friendly inn keepers who had lived there for centuries.

But not all purpose-built resorts failed. Megève was built in the 1920s by the French Rothschild dynasty, as an alternative to St. Moritz. It has authentic Alpine architecture, wood and stone, and is integrated with landscape.

By 1980, Alpine skiing had split. Traditional villages with small local lifts: undercapitalised, ageing infrastructure. And corporate resorts: modern lifts, brutal architecture, and efficient extraction.

But most villages still owned their mountains. Local families ran lifts, and profits mostly stayed local.

The Curse of Mass Tourism

Post-war prosperity changed who could afford skiing.

The German Wirtschaftswunder, Dutch middle-class wealth, British package holidays, and charter flights to Innsbruck and Geneva.

Suddenly, every insurance broker and account manager could afford skiing.

Most never got the farmer’s authentic village economy nor the aristocrat’s Grand Hotel luxury. But a standardised mediocrity pretending to be both. Like ‘Wiener’ Schnitzel made of pork and fried in seed oils, canned cürrywurst, and other tourist slop.

The Dutch skiing craze started in the 1930s, when people took ski lessons in Biltse Duinen (sand dunes). National champion Jan Boon demonstrated proper waxing and pole grip.

But Scrum Master driving his leased Skoda for long weekend of skiing is purchased comfort.

Package tourism (by Sunweb etc.) destroyed the class structure that made Alpine skiing functional. The authenticity could not survive when corporate resorts offered cheaper, more comfortable alternatives to their farms.

Aristocratic excellence could not survive with all the nouveau rich plebs. Grand Hotels with dress codes, private guides who knew every crevasse, multi-week stays building relationship with place: either compromised or dead.

What Is Lost

Skiing before mass tourism meant a close relationship to death. Nansen’s Greenland crossing. Amundsen’s South Pole expedition. The risk was real, the cold could kill you, and the mountain was indifferent to your survival.

Even recreational skiing retained this through the 1950s, with avalanches. crevasses, exposure. The lifts were scarce, you descended in uncertain conditions because piste grooming did not exist. The mountain was dangerous.

It meant relationship to place. The farmer knew the area, the aristocrat returned to the same guide, the same village, and same peaks for decades. August Julen guided Paul Getty, John F. Kennedy’s brothers, and countless European nobility through Zermatt’s peaks for over forty years. They knew him, and he knew them.

Skiing was part of village life, yet most modern skiing has none of this.

You got to a corporate resort you have never visited, ride heated gondolas operated by immigrant workers (yes they also reached the alps) who you will never see again.

You ski groomed runs designed for maximum throughput. Eat at a garbage restaurants serving €25 frozen Schnitzels. There is zero relationship to the mountain, the village, or the people who live there. An experience purchased, standardised, and spiritually void.

Adolfo Kind, the Swiss-Italian engineer who founded Ski Club Torino in 1901, climbed Piz Bernina in wool and leather. He died in a mountaineering accident in 1907. A mountain hut, Capanna Kind, was built in his honour in 1912, with materials carried up by mule.

This is what skiing is all about: it is dangerous, purposeful, and leaves permanent marks on the landscape and community.

Modern skiing completely demolishes this harmony.

But luckily there are still authentic places, that have that old-world charm to it.

In Damüls-Mellau, the Metzger family still runs the same T-bar their grandfather built in 1952. €48/day. The profit stays in the village.

Or in Obergurgl, where the Schultz family owns the mountain.

In Val di Fassa, the Ladin cooperative hasn’t sold to the Vail Corporation despite annual offers.

I know the names of these people. I know at what Gasthof’s to stay.

You’re reading this because you like those vintage nostalgic ski photos of better times.

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My grandfather was fond of brands like this. He always dressed sharp, even though he was a ‘simple’ mechanic at the Dutch Royal Air Force. He invested in pieces that lasted. The stores where he bought them could repair them. He owned pieces he’d been wearing for over 30 years.

Men like my grandfather never needed to doubt if the trench coat he bought was the Burberry ‘Made in Thailand’ edition or the more expensive Burberry Prorsum ‘Made in England’ edition.

There was only one Burberry back then.

Now you need to research whether the €400 Barbour jacket is still made in Britain or if it is the €150 Romanian version. Both carry the same brand label. But you will spend 4 hours on the internet learning that ‘water-resistant’ means nothing and ‘waterproof ratings might be lies. And also discover half the ‘Italian’ coats are made in the same Chinese factory as the €50 ones.

Your grandparents never had to do this. They walked into a shop, pointed at a coat, paid what it cost, and easily wore it for twenty years.

This essay is about how the destruction of intermediary institutions like guild systems, geographic protections (= enforceable brand reputations) created a cognitive tax our ancestors never paid. We pay for goods plus the mental exhaustion of navigating an economy where trust is impossible and quality is camouflaged by marketing.

Before ISO 9001 Certificates, standards were actually enforceable

The medieval guild system solved a fundamental economic problem: How does a buyer trust a seller when the buyer lacks expertise?

To become a master tailor in 17th century Amsterdam, it required 5 to 7 years as an apprentice, followed by producing a masterpiece, which is an actual garment judged by existing masters.

If you failed their standards, you could not sell under guild protection. The guild controlled who could practice the trade, what techniques were acceptable, what materials could be used for which purposes.

But this was not exclusionary gatekeeping. It was a form subsidiarity: a Christian/Catholic social principle that decisions should be made at the most local level capable of handling them. A guild knew its craftsmen, the craftsmen knew their suppliers, and the customer knew the guild enforced standards.

A wool merchant could not sell inferior fabric to a guild tailor because the guild would discover it. The tailor could not use shoddy stitching, because his reputation (enforceable through guild exclusion) was his livelihood.

There was no need for a customer to understand the difference between worsted and woolen. The guild system made that knowledge unnecessary for buyers. Trust was an enforceable mechanism.

(This is the exact thing that made us great: we built the best ships, made the best paintings, cook the best food, and in general built the best civilisation ever.)

In the 1960s, the 1,200 Harris Tweed weavers on the Outer Hebrides produced about 6.5 million meters of fabric annually. Every meter was woven from pure virgin wool dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides. Produced by islanders at their homes in the islands. The Harris Tweed Act of 1993 made it illegal to call anything ‘Harris Tweed’ unless it met these exact specifications.

The Act had teeth, since companies were sued, and The Orb trademark was protected. You could trust that Harris Tweed meant Harris Tweed.

Likewise, Barbour in 1894 made waterproof clothing for sailors and fishermen in South Shields. By the 1930s, they supplied the British military and Antarctic expeditions. Their waxed cotton jackets were fully repairable. Barbour maintained a rewaxing and repair service.

A jacket bought at Barbour in 1960 could still be repaired in 1990.

This was possible because Barbour used to control their own supply chain. They knew their suppliers, enforced their standards, and their reputation was a financial liability if they failed.

Geographic indicators work the same way. Parmigiano-Reggiano couldn not be made outside specific Italian provinces using specific methods. Champagne could not be made outside Champagne.

Price used to be a reliable signal, since production costs were real. An €800 coat cost €800 in order to make it with quality materials and skilled labor. An €50 coat cost €50 because it used cheaper materials and faster methods.

The customer did not need expertise to distinguish the two, since intermediary institutions provided it.

The Pattern: Acquisition to Extraction to Collapse

The destruction always happens in stages.

Barbour began producing ‘lifestyle’ lines in Eastern Europe and China in 2001. By 2010, you could buy a ‘Barbour’ jacket for €150 made in Romania, or a ‘Barbour’ jacket for €400 made in Britain. Same brand. Completely different products. The customer had to find out what the difference was himself.

Aquascutum, founded 1851, was acquired by Hong Kong-based YGM Trading. Production moved to China. The brand that invented the waterproof trench coat for British officers in the Crimean War now makes mass-market coats in the same factories as H&M.

Same with Jaeger, a 127 years old brand that collapsed in 2017. The private equity firm Better Capital acquired them in 2012, extracted value. They closed the British manufacturing, and moved production to Asia. And when demand collapsed, they shuttered it.

This is the pattern every time: Heritage brand makes less sales. Private equity acquires it. Production moves offshore. Brand equity gets extracted through ‘new vision.’ And finally: a complete collapse or zombie survival of the brand

Harris Tweed weavers numbered 200 by 2009. A steep downfall from the 1,200 in the 1960s. The Act still protected the name, but it could not protect the industry from Asian textile dumping and EU ‘free trade’ policies that prioritised cheap imports and margin optimalisation over our local economy.

It was the European Union that destroyed regional protections while claiming to protect them. Their geographic indicator laws protect local foods. But no such enforcement exists when Chinese usurp European brands, and flood our market with their plastic cars. Or when Amazon usurps European ecommerce retailers with their junk.

The managerial state chose global markets over subsidiarity. Brussels technocrats could not enforce local standards because they did not know local craftsmen. France and Italy just saved their food sector, but not their other craftsmen.

Guild knowledge has been replaced with ISO 9001 certificate standardised audit checklists, that measure nothing* about actual quality, rather procedures and checklists.

Progressive ideology completed the destruction with ‘democratisation of luxury’. Everyone deserves design(!), everyone deserves premium quality! The result is Italian design from Bangladesh, premium prices for Chinese production, and ‘heritage’ stories for Instagram dropshipper brands launched last year.

Modern globalisation is optimised for margin, not quality. That is why they flood our continent with infinite migrants, and brands need tons of marketing to hide their lack of quality. Brands like Prada, Louis Vuitton, Gucci: all famous brands that used to have extremely high quality standards. Now it is overpriced garbage no one should buy.

Global supply chains made accountability impossible. A coat could claim ‘Italian design’ while manufactured in Bangladesh, using Turkish fabric made from Indian cotton. When the coat failed, who was responsible? The brand? The factory? The fabric supplier?

Nobody. Which meant the customer became responsible for knowing which failures to expect. Same in politics. Same in customer service. Nobody is responsible for anything anymore.

Price stopped signaling quality. Manufacturing a coat in China cost €15 whether you sold it for €50 or €800. The difference was marketing budget and psyopped real estate prices in ‘exclusive’ shopping streets.

Standards became voluntary. Brand names became marketing assets detached from production reality. Same with ‘personal brands’ and influencers—unlike true artists, they never produced value or quality.

Quality became impossible to aspire to because quality has no enforceable definition anymore, besides some ISO norms.

I remember when I bought my first pair of Bottega Veneta loafers in 2016. Back then Bottega Veneta had very high quality standards. But it got ruined too in 2018 due to a new vision by their creative director: they are still recovering from that.

Manufactured Memories

The 2010s brought direct-to-consumer brands claiming to ‘cut out the middleman.’ Everlane, Shein, Warby Parker, and hundreds of startups promised ‘radical transparency’ and ‘no markup.’

What they actually did was eliminate the last remaining quality control that retailers provided. Department stores had buyers who visited factories, checked production runs, rejected shipments that failed standards. Direct-to-consumer brands eliminated that layer and pocketed the difference.

‘No markup’ actually meant ‘no one checking’ if the coat fulfills its purpose (keeping you warm).

Simultaneously, dropshipping destroyed even the pretense of brand integrity. You could launch an ‘Italian heritage’ brand from your apartment in Mumbai, order samples from Alibaba, create a Shopify store with sepia-toned AI photos of the Italian countryside, and claim your grandfather was a Milanese tailor. You could then ship directly from a Chinese factory to customers.

There is no penalty for lying anymore. Influencers promote anything for some quick cash. Amazon does not verify ‘made in Italy’ claims. I know this, as I almost bought sheep shearling gloves… until a customer review revealed it was not real sheep shearling, but synthetic garbage.

Sellers just shut down and relaunch under a new name the next day.

‘Sustainability’ replaced durability as the marketing term. Bigger brands stopped claiming their coats would last decades. Instead the now push ‘recycled materials’ and ‘carbon-neutral shipping.’ Whether the coat fulfills its purpose; to keep you warm, became irrelevant if it was made from ‘ocean plastic.’ An ecological disaster, leeching microplastics into our tapwater.

LVMH ruined the entire luxury market. Besides Louis Vuitton and Moët (one of the worst champagnes), they acquired brands like Loro Piana in 2013. Loro Piana had been a family company since 1924, sourcing the finest vicuña and cashmere, maintaining relationships with individual herders in Mongolia and Peru.

After each LVMH acquisition, product quality declined subtly, enough that customers noticed, but not enough that lawsuits followed. Heritage brands become a hype brands, prices increase, and quality declines.

Algorithm-driven fast fashion made even ‘luxury’ disposable. Zara releases 500 new designs weekly. Clothes designed not to last a season, but until the next trend drops online.

And trade associations… they are the modern perversion of guilds, yet fail to enforce standards. They serve lobby functions and offer consultancy: nothing more than that.

What should have been done?

Europe should have enforced geographic protections. Customs should have seized fake ‘Italian’ goods from Guangzhou. Governments should have fined shops claiming ‘British heritage’ while shipping from Shenzhen.

Luxury brands should have resisted private equity, like how Chanel or Brunello Cucinelli operate.

Craftsmen should have formed private certification systems when EU regulations killed regional protections. The Harris Tweed Act worked because it had teeth.

Consumers chose cheap over good. The result is omnipresent slop.

You can still find genuine quality. But finding them requires expertise. And most people can’t afford this. So they accept slop and spend hours researching which slop might be slightly less sloppy.

The cognitive tax compounds daily. Every purchase requires research. Every claim requires verification. Every ‘premium’ product might be rebranded slop.

That’s the cost of destroying subsidiarity and replacing it with global markets managed by technocrats who know nothing.

-Robbert

The guild system made expertise unnecessary. Now you need it.

Your grandfather trusted Barbour because the remnants of guilds enforced its standards. You now search YouTube videos because those intermediary institutions are dead.

The Taste Sprint will not help you pick better coats, but teaches you to see what guild masters saw. So you stop confusing vanity with actual craft.

In just 7 days you learn to…

• Day 1: Articulate why something works (not just that you like it)

• Day 2: Trace lineage (distinguish continuation from appropriation)

• Day 3: Spot 10 details you’d normally miss

• Day 4: Compare across eras (see what’s essential vs decoration)

• Day 5: Curate with constraint (force yourself to think, not grab)

• Day 6: Write 200 words explaining what you see

• Day 7: Measure how much your eye sharpened

What you get:

• 21-page workbook with examples

• Daily exercises + worksheets

• The ‘Sacred vs. Profane’ framework from Heritage Standard essays

• Reading list

Who this is for: Anyone tired of borrowing taste from the internet, brands, influencers, or ‘what’s popular.’ Whether you buy watches, furniture, clothes, or just want to understand why most modern stuff' everything feels fake.

Get The Taste Sprint* here (Just €29)

*Free for paid subscribers

Further Reading:

On guild systems and economic trust:

• Sheilagh Ogilvie, The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (Princeton, 2019)

• Steven L. Kaplan, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700-1775

On brand decay:

• James Surowiecki, ‘The Decline of Brands,’ The New Yorker, 2014

• Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (Penguin, 2007)

On heritage and fake heritage:

• Harris Tweed Authority, official certification standards

• Aquascutum administration, Financial Times, 2012

On craftsmen maintaining standards:

This essay is about why secular people cannot preserve Christian heritage while rejecting Christianity. Culture is inseparable from the spiritual. You cannot have Gothic architecture without Catholic theology, Latin mottos without believing them, feast days without fasting, or Christian civilisation without Christ. Secular heritage lovers have turned churches into museums, nightclubs, and apartments. Better to burn a church to the ground, than further desacralisation.

On the night of the 1st of January the Vondelkerk (a former church) in Amsterdam burned. Within hours, secular Amsterdammers flooded social media with grief about ‘our heritage’ and their ‘cultural tragedy’… by the kind of people who never attend Mass and give a €1 donation once every few years.

But the building that burned was not a church anymore. It only has the shape of it. In 1979 the Diocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam sold it for 1 guilder to a real estate investor. And was followed by decades of desecration: squatters in the 1980s, event venues from the 1990s until now, and finally Liberty Church: an American-style Protestant ‘worship community’ with PowerPoint screens and pop-song Christianity.

The famous architect Pierre Cuypers designed the Church in 1865 and serve as his home parish on his own street in Amsterdam.

He built a fifty-meter spire pointing toward heaven. Built in Neo-Gothic style serving Catholic liturgy. A sacred space designed for transcendence.

The fire did not destroy THAT church, but the event venue that happened to occupy its corpse.

The Death of the Vondelkerk

Pierre Cuypers established himself in Amsterdam in 1865, where he built the Vondelstraat (street) on his own land. A personal project in his neighborhood, and his architectural vision for Catholic Amsterdam.

The Church was neo-Gothic revival at its peak. Cuypers understood that architecture is theology in stone. Every element pointed upward, and the tower proclaimed God’s transcendence over the city. Its vaulted ceilings drew eyes toward heaven. Neo-Gothic style architecture was a rejection of the horizontal, the earthly, and the comfortable.

His vision on tower height was a theological conviction. Cuypers believed a church tower announces to the surrounding neighborhood that something greater exists. It breaks the skyline as God breaks into human existence.

For over a century, the Vondelkerk served its purpose. It had Daily Mass, confession, weddings, confirmations, funerals… The rhythm of everyday Catholic life in Amsterdam before WW-II and Vatican II.

But then came on October 23, 1969 ‘De Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde’ (Foundation of Dutch Literature), in collaboration with VPRO (TV-Station), hosted a televised program in the Vondelkerk honoring Gerard Reve, winner of the P.C. Hooft Prize. The program was deliberately blasphemous. Reve’s homosexual Catholic mysticism performed as spectacle in a Catholic church building. Desecration as entertainment.

By August 1978, the Diocese of Haarlem closed the building citing structural decay. Nine years of declining attendance, deferred maintenance, and the post-Vatican II collapse of Dutch Catholicism had gutted the parish. On October 12, 1979, the diocese sold the Vondelkerk for one guilder.

One guilder…

But the diocese could not even give it away properly. They handed Cuypers’ masterpiece to a real estate investor for the price of a coffee. The building was immediately squatted. For years, it housed anarchists, drug users, and Amsterdam’s countercultural drift.

Eventually it became an event venue. Weddings for people who wanted Catholic aesthetic, without the commitment. Corporate parties, fashion shows, art installations, profane concerts. And The Liberty Church a Protestant worship community, who holds Sunday services with projection screens and worship bands.

This is what secular Amsterdammers are mourning. Not a church, but a pile and an event space that means nothing to no one.

Post-Vatican II Clearance SALE

But the Vondelkerk is not unique. Across Europe, bishops asset stripped thousands of church buildings. They have been profaned into museums, nightclubs, bookstores, luxury apartments, restaurants, and even mosques.

Bishops in Western-Europe are in a perpetual clearance SALE since Vatican II.

In the Netherlands alone, over 700 Catholic church buildings have been deconsecrated since 1970. Some became cultural centers, some demolished, or became apartments. And many stand empty, waiting for a buyer.

In England, the pattern repeats. The Church of England closes an average of 20 churches per year. St. Peter’s in Liverpool became luxury apartments. Pitcher & Piano chain operates in converted churches across Britain. The Circus nightclub in London, a former church, advertises ‘divine decadence.;

In France they become mosques. The Saint-Éloi Church in La Chapelle-sur-Erdre was sold to Muslims in 2017 despite local Catholic protests. The Church of Sainte Rita in Paris became a mosque. Bishop Dominique Rey warned in 2022 that up to 5000 French churches face closure or conversion by 2030.

Germany’s Catholic Church closed over 500 churches between 2000 and 2020. Many became Protestant churches first, then secular venues, then nothing.

The justification is always the same:
‘Better to preserve the building than let it decay.’
‘Buildings always served multiple purposes.’
‘At least it remains in community use.’
‘We must adapt to changing times.’

That is cowardice disguised as pragmatism.

Profanation is worse than demolition

The Catholic Church has always distinguished between sacred and profane space. Once a bishop consecrates a church building, it is set apart for divine worship. The consecration prayers invoke God’s presence. The altar is anointed with chrism. The building becomes, in a limited but true sense, a holy ground.

Canon Law specifies that consecrated churches must be used for divine worship or they must be formally deconsecrated. Canon 1222 of the 1983 Code explicitly addresses this: if a church cannot be used for divine worship and cannot be repaired, the bishop can relegate it to ‘profane but not sordid use’, but only through formal episcopal decree after consulting the presbyteral council.

In the past 60+ years the asset stripping done by dioceses is highly questionable, as information on formal decrees of deconsecration often lack. Instead, they use bureaucratic language like ‘aan de eredienst onttrokken’ (withdrawn from worship). The Dioceses treat churches like nothing but inventory. Often parish councils are usurped by real estate investors. With no proper canonical procedure, or formal revocation of its sacred character.

Its post-Vatican II laxity at its worst. I’m sure the Dioceses have violated Canon Law, but certainly violated the spirit of it: treating consecrated churches as property transactions.

For the Vondel Church is has been forty-six years of desecration. Every profane use compounded the original betrayal. The fire did not destroy anything sacred. The sacredness was murdered decades ago. The fire just cremated the corpse.

Honest destruction is always preferable to lingering humiliation.

The Vatican II Hypocrisy

The mourning over the Vondelkerk reveals a deeper hypocrisy. The clergy now crying about fires destroying ‘our heritage’ said nothing when the Church itself demolished its sacred interiors.

Vatican II wreckovations destroyed more Catholic heritage than any arsonist or muslim terrorist could ever do. Between 1965 and 1985, dioceses across Europe ripped out high altars, demolished communion rails, whitewashed baroque frescoes, discarded medieval statuary, and threw centuries of sacred art into skips. Entire church interiors were sledgehammered to make room for versus populum tables and felt banners.

Relics of Church interiors from that these are still for sale in thrift shops and on eBay.

The Dioceses of the Netherlands initiated this process enthusiastically. No fires needes, their own modernist liturgical committees and clergy did the demolition.

Carved wooden reredos, marble tabernacles, gilded altarpieces, Monstrances, ancientChalices: All gone, sold or littered. It was replaced with concrete tables and abstract art. The ‘spirit of Vatican II’ accomplished in twenty years what Protestant iconoclasts spent centuries attempting: a systematic destruction of Catholic liturgical art and concept of Sacrality.

The secular heritage lovers were silent. They do not actually care about sacred heritage. They care about vibes and Pinterest. Beautiful things they can photograph.

Strip out the baroque altar and replace it with a concrete slab? Move on with the times!

Their sentimentalism is hollow. Mourned nothing when liturgical committees demolished ancient church interiors throughout the 1970s. Said nothing when bishops sold artefacts to fund ‘renovations’. Were absent when the Church destroyed its own heritage in the name of aggiornamento.

But now a building burns and suddenly they care about ‘our culture’. Yet they do not, they like the aesthetics divorced from meaning. The exact kitsch I inquisition with this newsletter. Heritage as a museum piece, not living tradition.

The Notre-Dame Lesson

Notre-Dame burned in 2019. And within days, over a billion euro was pledged for reconstruction. Secular France (LVMH, Kering, L’Oréal, Total, JCDecaux, BNP Paribas etc.) rallied around ‘our heritage’. And the whole world watched.

The cathedral reopened in December 2024. The Gothic exterior looks magnificent. Billions spent on restoration.

The interior now looks like a Freemasonic lodge. The 19th century stained glass window, which were not damaged in the fire, will be replaced with an atrocity depicting ‘modern France’. The worship of migrants and diversity. A sacred atmosphere stripped away in favour of ‘inclusive space’ that offends no one, yet also inspires no one.

This is how secular heritage preservation operates: preserving beautiful shells, yet housing nothing. Everything is a multipurpose space. Exteriors are maintained for tourists while the sacred purpose is erased.

The French government could have spent €500 million restoring an actual church. With Notre-Dame Style Latin Chant, golden vestments, and transcendent worship. The things that made Notre-Dame worth building.

Instead they spent the astronomical amount of donations by French globo corps to rebuild a tourist trap. Secular Europeans want aesthetics without Catholicism. Heritage without the faith.

But you cannot have one without the other.

Culture Proceeds from Cult

The word ‘culture’ derives from ‘cult’, specifically from the Latin cultus, meaning worship. And cultura and colere, meaning: to cultivate. Nowadays just etymological trivia. But it used to be the foundational truth on which Europe was built.

Culture is downstream from religion. Always, and everywhere.

European civilisation did not produce Christianity as one cultural expression among many. Catholicism produced European civilisation.

The universities, hospitals, orphanages, schools, legal systems, artistic traditions, architectural styles, musical forms, literary genres, and philosophical frameworks that define Europe all emerged from Christian worship and Christian theology.

Gothic architecture exists because medieval Europeans believed churches should lift hearts and minds towards God. The great cathedrals of Europe were built by people who believed the physical structure could participate in divine beauty.

Latin was preserved through the ‘Dark’ Ages because monks copied manuscripts. Universities emerged from cathedral schools, and the scientific method developed from Christian theology’s insistence that the natural world reflects divine rationality. Representative government grew from Christian anthropology’s emphasis on human dignity and the limits of political authority.

Remove Christianity and you do not just get neutral culture, but a zombie culture. With empty forms: traditions practised as a custom, not with understanding, buildings maintained without purpose, and holidays celebrated without meaning.

Keep churches Catholic or burn them down

The Diocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam faced a choice in 1979: maintain the Vondelkerk as a Catholic church, or close it permanently. They chose a third option. Sell it for one guilder and let others desecrate it.

The worst possible choice.

If Catholic life in a parish has genuinely died: no one attends, no priests are available, and the building cannot be sustained, then close the church honourably. Deconsecrate it, remove the sacred objects, demolish it or give it back to nature.

Never profane it into an event venue. Or let Protestants hold PowerPoint worship services on Catholic grounds. We should never turn altars designed for Christ’s sacrifice into stages for corporate networking. Or allow the sacred to be degraded into entertainment.

All the secular heritage preservationists will object. ‘But the architecture! The cultural value! We cannot let these buildings disappear!’

Yes, we actually can. And maybe even should.

Better demolish the Vondelkerk equivalents than become nightclubs, mosques, or luxury apartments. Our ancestors spent every last cent of their savings to build this churches, using them for anything else is spitting on their graves.

Culture that rejects its spiritual foundation is nothing but vain kitsch. Beautiful looking forms emptied of meaning.

Pierre Cuypers built a church, not a multipurpose event venue. His churches were consecrated to divine worship, designed to lift our hearts towards God, and meant to house the sacrifice of the Mass.

But when Amsterdam abandoned the Faith, it lost the right to Cuypers’ church.

The fire was just God’s sign for their Apostasy.

-Robbert

You sense that older things had something we’ve lost.

But you can’t articulate what that ‘something’ is.

So you default to luxury brands, artist names: whatever’s trending.

You’re outsourcing your judgment to people who are just as blind as you are.

That ‘minimalist’ brand you follow is just borrowed aesthetic with no principles.

That heritage product you bought is commercialised nostalgia with none of the craft.

That revival building everyone calls beautiful is pastiche of forms without understanding the original.

Most people move through culture like tourists in a museum. They’re looking without seeing, liking without understanding, and buying without judging.

The Taste Sprint teaches you to see…

It’s not just art theory or design history. It contains 7 days of exercises that force your eyes to work.

Day 1: Analyse 3 designs. Articulate why one will be beautiful in 50 years and two will look dated.

Day 3: Examine building facades. Trace their lineage through three architectural movements.

Day 5: Compare artefacts and identify which materials age versus decay.

Day 7: Walk into any room and immediately distinguish craft in service of function from style in service of signal.

By the end, you’ll easily spot the difference between:

• Authentic continuation vs. commercial appropriation

• Beauty from restraint vs. beauty from addition

• Objects made to last vs. objects made to sell

• Materials that age vs. materials that decay

Result: You’ll never be fooled again by fake modesty, heritage branding, or commercial revivalism again.

I wasted years learning this…

I have spent thousand of €€€’s on taste signaling. And accepted ugly ‘art’ because a teacher told me it was great. Borrowed my taste from magazines and brands because I had no standards of my own….

We all start somewhere…

The Taste Sprint condenses my education accumulated over years into 7 days.

With only 10-20 minutes per day. Not lectures, but practical exercises. A trained eye and the vocabulary to articulate what you see.

This is what I wish someone had taught me at 18.

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This essay is about how paintings were made to live with. Not to be stared at in silence, or to be locked behind glass. And certainly not to be turned into merchandise.

Art was made to be lived with. Not to be visited, or explained. It has always been part of the texture of life. Seen in the morning light, passed without thought in the afternoon, noticed anew at night.

Museums may have saved paintings from being lost, but in doing so, they destroyed the world that gave them meaning.

When art was removed from the home, its soul was severed from its body. What was once integrated into the rhythm of domestic life is now encased in glass, framed with context, and sold back to us on a tote bag. We preserved the object and obliterated its purpose. Even most churches nowadays are rather museums than actual places of worship.

Walk through any modern Dutch house and you will likely not find a single painting. You will find white walls, maybe a poster from a museum exhibition, purchased years ago and never reframed. But more likely an IKEA print, some digestible abstract shape, or a minimalist line drawing meant to project ‘taste’ without expressing anything. But more often, there’s no art at all.

People spend thousands on kitchen renovations and car leases. They subscribe to Spotify, Netflix, and gym memberships they do not use. Yet the thought of commissioning a painting for their home seems absurd. ‘Too expensive!’

And so they go to museums instead. They shuffle through exhibition halls in silent reverence. They pause in front of paintings for 30 seconds at a time, looking, but not seeing. They read the placard, and open the museum app. They take a picture for their Instagram story, for proof of cultural participation, and then move on.

One of the most photographed paintings is Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch. A small panel. 33.5 by 22.8 centimetres. It shows a European goldfinch, chained to a wooden feeding box. They look at it, nod, and return to their homes with blank walls.

The Purpose of the Goldfinch

Fabritius came out of a world in which painting was not a province of genius but rather the result of group mastery.

He was born in 1622 in Middenbeemster. His father was a schoolteacher and painter. And Fabritius first trained as a carpenter (fabritius being the Latin word for that profession) before apprenticing under Rembrandt in Amsterdam in the 1640s.

An apprenticeship in a master’s studio lasted between 4 to 6 years. The family paid for instruction, which was often between 20 and 100 guilders annually, and not including food or lodging.

The apprentice cleaned the studio, ground pigments by hand, stretched canvases, and prepared palettes. Paint at that time came not in tubes but as raw material to be ground and mixed. As an apprentice’s skill developed, he might contribute to minor areas of the master’s work: a tree, a sleeve, a curtain. Although the copyright belonged to the master.

After years of labour, an apprentice could submit a masterpiece to a local guild. Which was often called: The Guild of Saint Luke (E.g. in Gouda, Haarlem, Delft, Rotterdam, Bruges, Antwerp). If his art was accepted, he became a master himself. And was permitted to sign his name, sell work, and take on apprentices of his own.

The guild system produced more than competence. It created order: a hierarchy of skill, a standard of excellence, and a way of situating craft within the social fabric.

Fabritius joined the Guild in Delft in 1652. Unlike most of Rembrandt’s students, he developed a unique style: light backgrounds, soft textures, and delicate use of colour to suggest spatial complexity. He was fascinated with visual perception and painterly illusion. The Goldfinch is a technical marvel, not because it was grand, but because it is both exact and playful.

He sadly died 12 October 1654, when a gunpowder warehouse exploded in Delft. Which destroyed a quarter of the city. Fabritius died in his workshop, aged 32. Most of his work vanished in the blast. And only a dozen paintings of him remain, including The Goldfinch.

Domestic Art in the Lowlands

Painting in the Dutch Golden Age was made for homes, because Calvinism abolished church art.

A merchant in Amsterdam could commission a landscape for his receiving room. A still life for the dining room. And a moralising genre scene for his wife’s sitting room.

Every painting was measured for its place. And painters knew what room it would hang in, how the light entered, what objects would surround it. A trompe-l’œil like The Goldfinch was made to work under these precise conditions. It was art meant for a specific space. And it functioned as an integrated part of that space.

Viewers did not come to visit paintings, but they lived with them. You would pass by the same image ten times a day. You would begin to see its details differently over time. The seasons would change the tone of the light. And your mood would shift the feeling of the work. It was not art consumption, but a coexistence with it.

Both the Lowlands and Japanese share similar traditions in this, where Japanese changed their art with the seasons, the richness of light in Dutch art, reflected the time of the year. A Vermeer painting adjusts to the golden hour, the daytime and season.

But through artificial lightning and paintings being hung in museums, that entire relationship is now dead.

What the Museum Did

In no way do I want to hate on museums, which originated from rich art collectors. They saved many paintings from being lost forever. But they have extracted painting from the one environment in which it made sense.

When The Goldfinch resurfaced in 1859, it was no longer in a Dutch parlour. It had become a collector’s object: part of a private European art collection. Later it became a museum piece. Because in 1896 it was acquired by the Mauritshuis, which had been transformed into a public institution. The painting now belonged to the state.

It was presented as a democratic gesture: art for the people, not only for the rich. But in practice, it replaced a form of intimacy with another kind of exclusion. The work was no longer private, but it also no longer domestic either. It became sacred in the secular sense of ‘protected,’ ‘valuable,’ and ‘important.’ A relic of culture to be visited, venerated and commercialised.

The museum placed The Goldfinch in a climate-controlled white room, behind glass, flanked by security, tagged with an accession number. It is still a painting, but it no longer functioned as one.

A painting is just oil on a panel. It is situated in a place, seen repeatedly over time: in ordinary light, among other things, for the sake of delight. But museums erased all of that.

From Painting to Product

In 2013, Donna Tartt published her novel The Goldfinch. Fabritius’ painting suddenly became world famous. Yet… not as a painting, but as a literary reference, a plot device, and a brand.

Visitors queued outside the Mauritshuis to see ‘the painting from the book.’ They took selfies, bought postcards, posters, and other kitsch souvenirs.

But when they returned home, they were not changed. Their homes remained as boring as before.

Which is the final absurdity. We now have a culture in which people will stand in line to view a 17th-century painting that was made for someone’s home, only to never develop any taste of their own. And worse: not own any art themselves.

The problem is not just the loss of beauty. It’s the loss of memory: of what it was for. We love to admire stuff, but even revivalists can’t remake it.

The Work of Restoration

So what do we do now? The guilds are no longer there. We have no patron system anymore. The training is fractured, and the domestic context has been obliterated.

The answer is not to visit museums and galleries more often. We need to stop outsourcing beauty. Stop treating art like sacred objects reserved for expert preservation. And stop accepting that your house should be white, grey, and full of mass-produced sentimentality.

Commission art. Develop a taste, and live with it. Art might age, and might fade, but that’s how it will become part of your life’s texture. Beauty shouldn’t be a commodity to be visited. Beauty is a condition to be inhabited.

Historically, the Dutch understood this. That is why they spent what they had on paintings to furnish their souls.

We saved the painting, but killed the world it belonged to. Stop making pilgrimages to seek beauty, and bring it home.

— Robbert

Further Reading:

1. “The Goldfinch” (painting) - Wikipedia: Historical details about Fabritius’s painting, its provenance, and technical analysis
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldfinch_(painting)

2. “The Engagement of Carel Fabritius’ Goldfinch with the Dutch Window” - Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art: Scholarly analysis of the painting’s original function
   https://jhna.org/articles/engagement-carel-fabritius-goldfinch-1654-dutch-window-significant-site-neighborhood-social-exchange/

3. “Guilds and the Development of the Art Market during the Dutch Golden Age” - Simiolus: Economic history of Dutch guild system and art market
   https://www.jstor.org/stable/3780991

4. “The Amsterdam Guild of Saint Luke in the 17th Century” - Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art: Detailed examination of guild structure and membership
   https://jhna.org/articles/amsterdam-guild-of-saint-luke-17th-century/

5. “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt (2013): The novel that transformed the painting into a cultural phenomenon

6. Mauritshuis Museum website: Official museum information including visitor numbers and expansion details
   https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/

7. “Carel Fabritius: pupil of Rembrandt, painter of ‘The Goldfinch’” - Art UK: Biography and analysis of Fabritius’s brief career
   https://artuk.org/discover/stories/carel-fabritius-pupil-of-rembrandt-painter-of-the-goldfinch

8. “Dutch Golden Age painting” - Wikipedia: Overview of the period, market structure, and production scale
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Golden_Age_painting

9. “Apprenticeships and craft guilds in the Netherlands, 1600-1900”: Academic analysis of Dutch guild training system
   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310365470

10. “What Does Donna Tartt Think About ‘The Goldfinch’?” - Town & Country: Interview about the novel’s creation and the Frick exhibition coincidence
    https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a29022016/donna-tartt-goldfinch-interview/
    

This essay is about how the Advent went from 4 weeks of fasting in purple vestments to a 60-day shopping countdown: How we traded recollection for consumption, and lost Christmas in the process.

Between the 26th and 31st of December every year, the pavements in my neighbourhood are filled with fallen Christmas trees. Full pines, still strung with silver tinsel. Sometimes not even shaken out. They do not even make it to Epiphany (January 6th), which is the original Christmas Feast.

It is a time when nothing really happens. People have visited their families for Christmas, and offices are still open; but not really productive.

Each year, the Christmas season seems to start earlier. Decorations in shops appear in October. Advertisements call it ‘the most wonderful time’ before the clocks have changed. You hear songs on the radio, the lights go up, the markets open. And then, when the feast has just started, it is all dismantled.

By New Year’s Eve, any trace of Christmas is gone. Two months of premature festivity, climaxing in a single day of exhaustion, then thrown to the kerb like that tree.

To see what most get wrong about Christmas, you have to start earlier.

It all begins with the Advent. And even most Catholics are barely aware of what the Advent is.

The season that vanished

Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas. Historically it started at Saint Martin’s Day, and ended January 6th, Epiphany. It is a full season in its own right. Nowadays it lasts about 28 days, more or less. But it is not a celebration, rather a time of preparation and penance.

The liturgical colour is purple, shared with Lent. The tone is penitential, though gentler. The readings trace the longing of Israel for the Messiah. And in the final week, the O Antiphons rise like candle flames in the dark: O Sapientia, O Adonai, O Radix Jesse. Each one a cry: Come.

The Advent season is structured and has form. The Church assigned it four theological themes:

1. The Incarnation – The Word made flesh.

2. The Second Coming – Not just the memory of the first, but the preparation for the return.

3. Remission of Sin – The soul turned inward in penitence.

4. Spiritual Rebirth – The heart remade in Christ at Christmas.

A full spiritual architecture, never meant to be a countdown, but as a clearing of the ground.

In my church, the Rorate Mass is still offered. ‘Roráte caéli désuper,
et núbes plúant jústum’ — Drop down, ye heavens, from above,
and let the skies pour down righteousness.

It is celebrated on the Ember Wednesday in the Advent, in darkness before dawn, lit only by candles. In a cold church the priest chants the liturgy by firelight.

That is a metaphor for Advent. A season in the dark. Not a prelude to Christmas consumption. It is a distinct time, with its own discipline, silence, and reason for existing.

But it barely exists now, even amongst Catholics.

The inversion of Christmas

What we now call the ‘Christmas season’ begins early November, sometimes earlier. It arrives with decorations, music, films, parties, lights, advertising and a carefully managed sense of joy. Nativity scenes, if they appear at all, often show Christ already in the manger. The feast begins during the fast

And then, on the 25th of December, it is finished. In the Netherlands we have the 26th as ‘The Second Day of Christmas’ (which is there because Protestants found it unfair they had so few Feast Days, compared with Catholics).

But this is the inversion. Advent is a season of restraint, but has become Christmas. And Christmas, which was once a season of celebration, has been reduced to 48 hours. In the West, the 25th is presented as the climax, although it was not always the principal feast. In earlier centuries, and still today in Eastern Europe, Epiphany is the greater celebration. Yet by the 6th of January, no one is thinking about Christmas. It has already gone.

Their tree went up in November. And by the time Christmas Day arrives, the entire performance is already collapsing. The sparkle has worn off, children are overstimulated, and the adults are exhausted. No sense of culmination, only relief that it is over.

The older calendar moved in the opposite direction. Advent came first, then Christmas, with its brightness, feasting, and sense of arrival. The darkness prepared the ground for the light. And restraint gave shape to the joy. In this way the Feast made sense.

But not only has that structure been forgotten, it has been reversed.

The rhythms that shaped the year, liturgical and natural alike, have been set aside. There is no Advent, but neither is there Lent. No one knows Epiphany, Ascension or Time after Pentecost any more. Our calendars are completely detached from any natural cycle. Everything now arrives early, burns out quickly and leaves no trace. Whether it is Easter, Christmas or even the Ramadan.

To live without rhythm is to live unnaturally. By doing so you reject the shape of time, the need for silence before speech, for modesty before feast, and darkness before dawn.

But without preparation, celebration is hollow. Without silence, joy is nothing but noise.
And without seasons, life is always the same.

The 40 days of Christmas

Christmas does not end on 25 December. It has just started, and has so many liturgically rich feasts, even most Catholics take for granted.

It runs until 2 February: the Feast of the Presentation, also called Candlemas. There is a candle procession to commemorate Christ’s entrance into the Temple:

‘Now, Master, you let your servant go in peace. You have fulfilled your promise. My own eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all peoples. A light to bring the Gentiles from darkness; the glory of your people Israel.’

(Luke 2, 25–32, Roman Breviary)

The Christmas season includes the Feast of the Epiphany, when Christ is revealed to the Gentiles. It includes the Baptism of the Lord, and unfolds through the darkest part of the year as a season of light and joy.

Candlemas marks the end. Mary and Joseph bring the child to the temple. Simeon lifts the infant Christ and says, Mine eyes have seen thy salvation, a light to lighten the Gentiles. The candles are blessed. The light that came at Christmas is offered to the world.

And then, only then, does the season close.

What we are left with

The yearly calendar was not an aesthetic flourish, but pedagogy, for it trained the soul in rhythm: from fast to feast, from darkness to light, and finally from longing to fulfilment.

You cannot feast every day, because then it ceases to be a feast. And you cannot live in permanent celebration, because it becomes hollow.

That is why positivity gurus, in my opinion, only make matters worse.

Advent gave Christmas meaning, so when the season arrived, it felt like an arrival. And it lasted, because joy needed time to unfold. It was not supposed to be rushed. It should not be crammed into a single evening.

But we do not live in this rhythm now. We have commercial cycles instead. We have sales events, Black Friday and Boxing Day, Cyber Monday and New Year’s detoxes.

November and December have become frantic excess, followed by January and a feast to celebrate depression: Blue Monday.

Commemorate Advent while it stills lasts, to better prepare yourself for the Feasts to come…

-Robbert

This essay explores how the ancient Sinterklaas tradition was shaped by both Christian saints and pre-Christian winter spirits. Over time, commercial standardisation hollowed it out. More recently, multicultural reform stripped it of its remaining meaning. By removing what was once strange, wild, and dangerous, we lost the very things that made the tradition worth preserving.

The global war on tradition rarely announces itself as such. It comes cloaked in good intentions: inclusion, multiculturalism, and progress. But across the West, local folk customs, from the Gaelic Halloween to Carnival to Christmas, are being critiqued, censored, edited, softened, or erased to fit globalised morals. What began as organic, often ancient rituals are increasingly reinterpreted through ideological frameworks imported from elsewhere.

In the Netherlands, a cultural conflict centers on the Saint Nicholas Feast and especially his helper(s): Black Pete. Every year there are people protesting for and against black Pete. The feast is still there, but the tradition: as it was lived, feared, remembered, is being systematically dismantled.

The streets used to be decorated with Saint Nicholas scenes, and children where somewhat afraid when Saint Nicholas came: because he came to judge both the good and the bad kids. At least… that was the case when I grew up in the early 2000s. Bad children don’t exist anymore.

This piece is about what happens to cultures when they are told they may no longer remember themselves.

Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker

Nicholas of Myra was a fourth-century bishop in what is now Turkey. At the Council of Nicaea in 325, when the heretic Arius denied Christ’s divinity, Nicholas reportedly struck him in the face. So the other bishops stripped Nicholas of his vestments for this breach of decorum. That night, Christ and Mary appeared to several bishops in dreams, commanding them to restore Nicholas. The vestments were returned.

This is the man we celebrate in December. Not a jolly gift-giver, but a defender of orthodoxy willing to use his fists when words failed. The legends that accumulated around him reflect this: he rescued sailors from storms, saved three girls from prostitution by throwing bags of gold through their window, and resurrected three murdered children from a barrel of brine where a butcher had hidden them.

His stories spread across Europe after his death. His relics were stolen from Myra by Italian merchants in 1087 and brought to Bari, where his cult exploded. Every sailor, every merchant, every person in danger invoked Nicholas. The Eastern Church venerates him as a wonder-worker. The Western Church made him patron of children, merchants, students, brewers, pawnbrokers, and the falsely accused.

By the medieval period, his feast day (6 December) was marked across Europe with processions, gift-giving, and inversions of social order. Children became bishops for a day. Servants were served by masters. The world turned upside down for one night, then righted itself.

The inversions varied by region. In the Netherlands, Nicholas rode a white horse. In parts of Germany and Austria, he travelled with Knecht Ruprecht or Krampus, demonic figures who punished wicked children while Nicholas rewarded the good. These were not uniform traditions. They were local, rooted in place, shaped by centuries of practice that blended Christian saint and pre-Christian winter spirits.

The saint remained recognisable even when accompanied by creatures from pagan origins.

The Black Pete Tradition

The blackening tradition is older than most people think. Long before Jan Schenkman published his 1850 picture book, Dutch folklore knew the black bogeyman. In 1792, De Joodsche Wandelaar described him: ‘I had blackened my face and rattled so terribly with the chain that the house shook. With a hollow voice I asked if there were any naughty children? That I was Sinter Klaas, who now rode to look for boys who would not learn, but who had apples, nuts, chestnuts and Sinterklaas goods for sweet children.’

This was Sinterklaas himself: blackened and terrifying. In Protestant regions where Catholic saint veneration was forbidden, the bishop figure was suppressed. What remained was chain-rattling black bogeyman that gave sweets to good children and threatened the wicked. Sometimes called him ‘Zwarte Klaas’, sometimes Piet met de Pooten, sometimes just the Devil.

The blackening meant disguise and otherness. The soot separated the masked figure from ordinary humanity. On the Wadden Islands, the Ouwe Sunderklazen wore blackened faces or masks well into the twentieth century. In North Germany, similar figures appeared: Sunnerklaus on Wangerooge, Bullerklas in Westphalen, and Aschenklas who carried a bag of ashes. All had darkened faces, and combined saint and demon.

An 1802 Amsterdam education book warned against the practice: ‘One had, in former times, and still has here and there, the bad custom that on the day dedicated to a Roman saint named St. Nikolaas, fellows were disguised and blackened, who then had to represent that saint, went around houses with rattling chains and frightened the children.’ The author described how his brother died of terror after such an encounter.

The Standardisation

Everything changed in 1850. Amsterdam schoolteacher Jan Schenkman published Sint Nikolaas en zijn knecht, codifying the modern Dutch Sinterklaas. In Schenkman’s version, Nicholas arrives by steamboat from Spain, rides a white horse over rooftops, and is helped by a helper who climbs down chimneys.

The book was illustrated. The knecht had dark skin, curly hair, red lips. Schenkman gave him no name. Whether he intended a Moorish servant (Spain had been under Islamic rule) or a soot-covered chimney sweep is debated. What matters is that, unlike leftist say, Schenkman did not invent the blackening. He only took the black boogeyman tradition and made it a less scary servant.

Within decades, Schenkman’s version became the version. Regional variations were dismissed. The threatening black boogeyman became cheerful Black Pete. The chains and terror slowly disappeared. By 1895, ‘Zwarte Piet’ was the standard name, though regional variants persisted: Assiepan, Sabbas, Hans Moef, Jacques Jour, Sjaak Sjoor.

On Ameland, the Sunneklaas tradition continued. It preserved elements that elsewhere had been sanitised. An actual continuation of older customs that the Church had absorbed but never quite suppressed.

The first death was the standardisation. What had been living traditions, adapted locally over centuries, became a national brand.

The Multiculturalist Kitsch

In 2011, a UN working group on people of African descent visited the Netherlands and declared Black Pete a racist caricature. Dutch activists, brainwashed by American racial obsessions agreed. They saw blackface, minstrelsy, and colonialism.

None of these things were ever relevant in the Netherlands. We did not have black face minstrels. These people see the world through American racial categories, and which permit only one interpretation of a dark-skinned figure in service to a white authority: racism.

But the actual history (pagan wild men, soot traditions, medieval inversions, Protestant suppression of Catholic saints leading to blackened boogeyman figures, syncretism between Christian and pre-Christian) was irrelevant. Intentions were irrelevant, regional variations were irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was how the tradition made foreigners feel when filtered through an ideology imported from a country that has no tradition, and no understanding of European folklore.

So they came with a compromise: Rainbow Pete, Soot Sweep Pete (Roetveegpiet). Dozen compromises, each more pathetic than the last. Petes with strategically placed soot smudges. Petes in various skin tones to represent ‘diversity’. Costumes changing based on whatever the municipality’s diversity committee approves.

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But none of this satisfies anyone. The activists are not happy because Pete still exists. And the rest of the population is not happy because the tradition is gutted. It was already a commercial spectacle by the time the blackface debate began.

Which was its second death: the reduction of a complex folk tradition with pre-Christian roots into a simple question of representation. Is this racist? becomes the only question we’re allowed to ask. The answer, pre-determined by academic ideology, restructures the entire tradition.

What is lost is everything that made it worth defending. The wild men are gone. The inversion of order is gone. The hint of danger, the moment when children were not sure if they’d get gifts or beatings, the annual reminder that saints and demons occupy the same calendar: it is all gone.

We’re left with a celebration that offends foreigners, and is protected by kitsch nationalists, who do not know anything, except that Pete used to be black.

We now have a tradition maintained out of habit, defended without conviction, and reformed into meaninglessness.

The Christian Heritage

The medieval Church was smarter than contemporary diversity managers. When missionaries encountered pagan winter festivals, they did not ban them, but baptised them. The winter solstice became Christmas. The wild hunt became the retinue of saints. The gift-giving, the feasting, and the inversions were all redirected towards Christian ends without erasing their pagan origins.

This worked because tradition and religion is lived, and not theorised. People need their festivals. They need moments when the normal order breaks, with figures who are half-saint, half-monster. Figures that reward and punish, and come from outside the everyday world bearing gifts and threats.

Black Pete in his original form was one of these figures. He was never a caricature, since he did not represent an actual human being. He was otherness itself: the stranger, the wild, the dangerous.

The Protestant suppression pushed the tradition underground, and transformed the bishop into a boogeyman. The tradition survived because it served a function that people needed: An annual inversion, a moment of terror and gift-giving combined: a reminder that the world contains forces beyond human control.

The activists who destroyed this understood nothing. They thought they were fighting racism. But actually fought the last remnants of European pre-Christian traditions that the Church had wisely preserved within Christian celebration.

The result is a Sinterklaas celebration that has been sanitised into corporate hospitality. Whether Soot Sweep, or completely Black: the helpers are not wild men, they’re not dangerous or mysterious. Just men and women in costumes and a committee-approved number of helpers in whatever combination they fancy.

The conclusion

Standardisation weakens tradition. Multiculturalism, which is kitsch in itself, can only accept the superficial. The things that cannot insult others: foods, clothing etc.

The standardisers at least wanted the tradition to continue. They wanted it predictable, commercial, safe. It succeeded, and left the structure intact. Because their hollowed-out Saint Nicholas was still recognisable.

But each concession leads to another demand. Each reform requires another reform. The process ends only when nothing remains.

This is what happens when traditions are subjected to ideological scrutiny rather than organic evolution. Real traditions change slowly in response to genuine need and local adaptation. They are not reengineered by committees to satisfy foreigners who have no connection to our traditions.

The Dutch should have told the UN working group to shut up. They should have told that their objections do not apply to European folk customs. They should have defended Black Peter, not as a caricature, but as a survival of pre-Christian tradition that has nothing to do with race at all.

They did not because liberals do not believe in anything. And now Sinterklaas is dying. But not because of persecution (that might have strengthened it) but by a thousand reforms bringing the tradition closer to irrelevance.

The children nowadays never face the wild men anymore. Their parents barely dare to correct them. The next generation will remember that Sinterklaas as a corporate mascot, just like American Santa Claus.

The feast might survive. But the actual living practice, rooted in place and history, shaped by centuries of Christian and pre-Christian interaction is already dead.

And no amount of Black Petes will bring that back.

-Robbert

Further reading:

• Een kleine overweging voor het feest van Sint Nicolaas, FSSPX (Dutch)

• Sint Nikolaas en zijn knecht, Jan Schenkman (Dutch)

• Zwarte Klaas is Zwarte Piet, Sint en Pietgilde (Dutch)

• Black Pete & Sinterklaas: UN experts encourage respectful national debate on Dutch tradition (English)

• In defence of Black Pete, Marcel Bas, Roepstem (English)

• The Origin of Krampus, Europe’s Evil Twist on Santa, Smithsonian Magazine (English)

YouTube

• Sinterklaas: meer dan een kinderfeest? | #1766 Michiel de Jong (Dutch)

Schipper Theodoor de Jonge checked the diesel motor one final time. The boat had carried researchers, artists, and anyone willing to understand what the Wadden Sea actually is. But Rijkswaterstaat decided that even twenty-eight people, four times a year, constituted unacceptable “disturbance.” The islands would become a “reference area”, which is a place where bureaucrats could monitor what happens when humans disappear.

The students went to the Engelsmanplaat instead. They saw a seal. They took photos. The boat returned to harbor and will rust in Zoutkamp until someone buys it. De Jonge said it’s good this way. But his words carried no conviction.

This is Dutch nature conservation in 2025 means: sealed rooms where nothing lives but what the state permits. Managed by people who confuse sentiment with stewardship.

This story was published in Trouw, a Dutch newspaper this week. It saddened me, as again this a part of how the elites want to unroot us from our environment.

A Managed Wilderness

When the Zuidelijk Flevoland polder drained in 1968, water collected in the lowest point. Birds arrived. Frans Vera, a young ecologist at Staatsbosbeheer, saw an opportunity. He proposed that large grazers could maintain the landscape. He swa that natural processes, and not human management, should shape the terrain.

In 1983, Vera personally selected thirty-two heckrunderen from across Europe. He watched them enter the Oostvaardersplassen with “wildness still in their genes.” This was nature in its proper form. Eighteen konikpaarden followed in 1984. Forty edelherten arrived in the early nineties.

His idea was simple: the ecosystem would regulate itself. Abundant years meant growth. Lean winters meant correction through natural selection. International ecologists praised the result. The Oostvaardersplassen would become the equivalent to Africa’s Serengeti. A proof that Europe could host dynamic nature.

By 2017, five thousand animals grazed the area. But the park Vera imagined never materialised. Instead it is barren ground where starving beasts searched for scraps.

Sixty percent of them died in the winter of 2017-18. The bird populations the area was meant to protect vanished. And the small mammals, the native grazers, were outcompeted to extinction.

Then the activists arrived. Demonstrators organised funeral processions for dead animals. Farmers’ wives planted crosses for fallen deer. Heckrunderen were compared to concentration camp victims. Someone sent Vera a photoshopped image of himself in Staatsbosbeheer uniform giving the Hitler salute, captioned “Mein Kamp by Franz Vera.” Available as a poster.

The attacks escalated. In March 2018, Vera received an anonymous letter threatening his grandchildren with violence unless he publicly renounced his work. He went silent.

The province capitulated. Under pressure from activists who fed the animals, cut the fences, and threatened forest rangers, Flevoland commissioned the Van Geel report.

Its conclusion matched what the province wanted: mass culling to prevent ‘suffering’. Healthy deer were shot. Konikpaarden were relocated. The ‘natural processes’ Vera championed were declared incompatible with Dutch sensibilities.

Vera withdrew to his attic and spent a year writing 228 pages of ecological and legal analysis. In 2019, the court sided with him. The province had violated Natura 2000 regulations. The culling order was destroyed.

It did not matter, as new permits were issued. Different ecologists produced reports reaching different conclusions. And the shooting resumed.

In 2019, for the first time since 2006, no white-tailed eagles nested in the Oostvaardersplassen. The bird Vera had championed since childhood, extinct as a Dutch breeder since the Middle Ages until it returned to his reserve, was gone. Driven out by the chaos of the new management during breeding season.

Two Failures

The Oostvaardersplassen collapsed twice.

First, as Vera’s experiment: a theory imposed on reclaimed seabed that produced a barren moonscape instead of parkland. Second, as a reserve, when they surrendered to activists who confused their feelings about animals with concern for ecosystems.

In both failures nature was treated as something other than what it is.

Vera was right that Dutch nature management had become gardening: manicured, controlled, and expensive. But he was wrong to think that releasing animals in a fenced polder constituted restoration of natural processes. You cannot create wilderness by a declaration. The Oostvaardersplassen were never wild.

The activists were right that watching animals starve is ugly. But wrong to think that preventing starvation constitutes nature conservation. Their victory did not produce better conditions for animals, but even more bureaucratic control: permits, culls, and relocations. All the machinery of management they claimed to oppose.

The Nitrogen Lunacy

The same confusion now suffocates the entire Netherlands. The ‘stikstofcrisis’ frames nitrogen as an ecological threat requiring emergency measures. The real threat is the threshold itself.

In 2003, Agriculture Minister Cees Veerman imposed nitrogen limits on Natura 2000 areas. By 2019, the ‘disturbance’ threshold had dropped to 0.005 mol/ha/year. Which means: 0.07 grams of nitrogen per hectare per year. Building a house requires a permit at this level, so does moving a cow.

While Germany uses a threshold 4,000 times higher, and their nature ‘magically’ survives.

The Advisory board ‘Meten en Berekenen Stikstof’ calls the Dutch standard “false precision.” And it is theater, but one with enormous consequences: €93.5 billion in blocked construction, farmers exiled from ancestral land. And nature areas that expand through bureaucratic conquest rather than ecological necessity.

In Overijssel, the Lemselermaten Natura 2000 area will grow from 56 to 124 hectares. Nineteen reports totaling 1,279 pages justify this. Bulldozers will scrape topsoil, demolish trees, and fill streams. All meant to “restore” soil that was fine until experts decided it needed improvement.

A local dubbed the consulting firms behind these reports ‘the nature maffia’. The name stuck because these are not scientists. It are contractors who know which conclusions pay. Retired ecologists, like my beekeeping teacher, called them out. But agencies ignore guys like him, and so do local governments.

The Vatican Followed

Even Rome surrendered to the lunacy. In 2015, Pope Francis published Laudato Si, 191 pages calling for ‘ecological conversion’ without once mentioning contraception or procreation, the Church’s true teaching on creation.

Jeffrey Sachs, who advocates population control, spoke at the Vatican symposium before the encyclical. Hans Schellnhuber, who presented it to the press, has stated Earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ is under one billion people. Current population: eight billion.

Hypothetically he’s right. A distributist world with one billion people living Sanctifying lives (cultivating land, building communities, ordering existence toward God) is superior to eight billion living as swarms in overpopulated cities. But Schellnhuber and Sachs do not propose sanctified living. They want contraception, abortion, state-enforced sterility. Fewer people through immoral means to sustain their immoral systems.

Francis condemned abortion in one paragraph, then spent the document calling for a ‘world political authority’ with power to ‘sanction’ polluting nations. He proposed that developed countries accept ‘decreased growth’. Economically I agree, we need to get rid of our growth fetish. But not framed in Malthusian terms that treat people as tradable commodities. The Pope gave these wicked men a platform without challenging their methods.

The encyclical treats creation not as a gift revealing divine order but as a problem requiring global management. This is pantheism in papal robes.

But the Church knows better. Monasteries did not ‘restore nature’. They cultivated it, by clearing forests, draining swamps, planting orchards, and building fishponds. Their way of life produced smaller populations naturally: celibacy, delayed marriage, ordered communities. Their land grew more fruitful.

Archbishop Lefebvre advised the faithful to return to the land not to ‘rewild’ it but to work it. The earth is not sacred. It is the stage where we work out salvation.

The Main Problem

What connects the sealed Rottum islands, the Oostvaardersplassen disaster, the nitrogen regulations, and Laudato Si?

The belief that humans are the problem.

The conservationists sealing Rottumeroog think twenty-eight visitors four times yearly constitute a massive disturbance. The activists who destroyed Vera’s project think watching animals endure winter constitutes cruelty. The bureaucrats calculating nitrogen to three decimal places think human presence constitutes contamination. The clergy hosting Jeffrey Sachs think human population constitutes catastrophe.

All of them are wrong. Humans are not a disturbance. We are part of creation.

The Dutch coastline, the polders, and dikes are not wounds. Our ancestors did not destroy the Netherlands by building it. They made our soil habitable. And when they wanted beauty, they did not lock it away. They built parks for people to walk, planted trees where people could rest. They understood that nature separated from human life becomes museum or laboratory.

Modern conservation offers neither beauty nor utility. It offers control over land, development, creation itself. Success is measured not by flourishing but by absence: fewer people, less activity, more emptiness.

I hated the Oostvaardersplassen at first. I thought the people behind it must be sadists. But Frans Vera spent forty years building an ecology based on process rather than management. Bureaucrats did not allow him to make it flourish. And activists destroyed it by demanding management based on sentiment rather than process. The province complied. The court briefly intervened. And nothing changed.

The pattern repeats itself again and again. When they sealed Rottumeroog, they claimed protection, yet produced absence. When activists unintentionally forced the Oostvaardersplassen culls, they claimed compassion but produced bureaucracy. When the state imposed nitrogen thresholds, it claimed science but produced tyranny.

Modern conservation conserves nothing. It manages. And what it manages, it kills.

We need humans working land, raising animals, building communities, leaving their children a world that is cultivated, and not sealed off.

This is what’s meant by stewardship. It’s what the monasteries and farmers always practiced.

The Noordster made its last crossing because bureaucrats decided our presence was unacceptable. The students just wanted to learn about seals. They did not learn what they might have on Rottumeroog. Such remoteness is not sanctity, and a place no one can see serves no one.

Schipper de Jonge said it’s good this way. He’s lying. And we should stop pretending otherwise.

-Robbert