28: Dunkerque

On Tuesdays, I finish work two hours before the next available train to Lille. This week I had nothing to do, and it was a particularly nice November day, so I decided to explore Dunkirk a little. All I have really seen is the area surrounding the train station, the 20 min route west to my high school, and Grande-Synthe. An industrial port town with typically gray skies, the extensive construction projects currently underway do Dunkirk no favors. My students at Noordover have assured me on several occasions that there is nothing entertaining or interesting in the Dunkirk area except the beach and movie theater. Since Christopher Nolan apparently disagrees, I set out to see the town.

Dunkirk was founded a millennium ago as a small fishing village on sandbanks bordering the North Sea. According to legend, Saint Eloi converted the inhabitants and established a place of worship on the dunes (Duin Kerk = dune church). In the years that followed, Dunkirk switched hands many times between Flanders, Spain (which once controlled the Netherlands), and France. (One day, the 25 June 1658, the city changed nationality three times!). Definitively French since 1662, the port was fortified and would house corsairs such as Jean Bart, a Dunkirk native and privateer who became a French Naval hero under the sun king Louis XIV. Today, Dunkirk is known as “the city of Jean Bart”, and his statue in the eponymous Place has stood since 1845.

A little north of Place Jean-Bart is the Church of Saint-Eloi. The original “duin kerk” was replaced in the XV century by a «hallekerk» (church-hall, traditional architecture for the region/time), along with a «belfroi» (bell-tower) that still stands today:

Destroyed in 1558 by the invading French, the hallekerk was replaced by a gothic-flamboyant church connected to the original bell-tower over a public road between them. Unlike typical gothic churches, Saint-Eloi is not fortified by flying buttresses, but rather by metal rods visible in the interior.

In 1782, the church was disconnected from the bell-tower and given a neo-classical façade, which due to poor construction lasted less than a century before being replaced by a gothic façade in the Ile-de-France (Paris region) style.

Nearly destroyed in WWI, the church was painstakingly reconstructed over 15 years, and a commemoration to the Dunkerquois who died in the Great War was added to the bottom of the bell tower.

Ten years later, the church was again nearly destroyed by the advancing Nazis, and a similarly long reconstruction began after the war.

The Hotel de Ville, just north of the church & bell tower, was built in the flemish rennaissance style in 1901. A statue of Louis XIV above the door celebrates Dunkirk’s definitive reunion to France in 1662, and stained glass inside shows Jean Bart’s triumphant return to the city after a naval victory in 1694.

A final note worth hitting is the carnival of Dunkirk. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, Dunkerquois ship-owners would offer their fisherman-sailors a feast along with half of their pay before they set off for 6 months of fishing for herring off the coast of Iceland. This eventually merged with the mask-wearing festivities of “fat monday”, mardi gras, and Ash Wednesday («Les Trois Glorieuses», the three glorious days). Hundreds of years later, the tradition is well alive and has grown into as many as 50,000 revellers crossdressing, marching in bands, and singing incomprehensible local chants. I’m sure there will be a carnival-focussed post later on when I attend, but for now suffice it to say that the annual event climaxes with a massive crowd in front of city hall chanting that they want the “herring they deserve”. The mayor then throws 450 Kilos of herring down from the balcony.

Looping back around the harbor to catch my train, I got a shot of the Hotel de Ville and St. Eloi’s bell-tower in the distance.