Oude Kerk, Amsterdam

Oude Kerk is a working Reformed church and Amsterdam’s oldest surviving building, with its roots in a wooden chapel established around 1213. The stone church was consecrated in 1306 as a Catholic church dedicated to Saint Nicolas, and it became Reformed after the Reformation of 1578. Its form belongs to Holland Gothic: a broad hall church with timber vaults and tall pointed windows.

The wooden ceiling uses Estonian oak dated to 1390, creating the largest medieval wooden vault in Europe. Beneath you, the entire floor is made from gravestones. About 2,500 stones mark the burial place of roughly 60,000 Amsterdam citizens, because people continued to be buried inside the church until 1865.

Rembrandt came here often, and his children were baptised here; his wife Saskia was buried here in 1642. The church also holds four pipe organs. Among them is the Vater-Müller organ, built in 1724 and regarded as one of Europe’s finest Baroque organs. Since 2012, this historic church has also hosted contemporary art exhibitions, so religious history and newly commissioned installations share the same interior.