Sint-Bavokerk

The Grote Kerk or St.-Bavokerk is the largest church in the Dutch city of Haarlem. It is dedicated to Saint Bavo.

It is built in the Gothic style of architecture and started its life as a Catholic church. It has been a cathedral from 1559 until it was confiscated in 1578 and converted to Protestantism. Around 1900 a new Catholic cathedral known as the Cathedral of Saint Bavo was built in Haarlem.

Until 1831 graves were made in the church. A local story is that there is a grave of a child who used to hit his mother. After a time his hand started growing above his grave, and a copper plate had to be installed on the grave to stop the hand from growing.

Bells

Legend has is that the two upper bells in the tower are taken from Damiette ("Damiate" in Dutch) during the Fifth Crusade by Haarlem knights and that since 1561 the two bells are rung every evening between 21:00 and 21:30 o'clock, to commemorate the conquest of Damiette on August 25 1219. In reality, they were a gift by Johannes Dircks, a bell-maker from Aalst to Nicolaas van Nieuwland, the bishop of Haarlem.

In any case, the ringing of the bells indicated the closing of the city gates. Two new upper bells were placed in 1732, created by Jan Albert de Grave.

In 1932 the clock on the tower was upgraded with electrical lights.

Fires

On May 22 1801 there was a fire caused when lightning struck the tower. A disaster was prevented by Martijn Hendrik Kretschman, the guard of the tower, and three other men. In 1839, one of those men, Jan Drost, committed suicide in the tower after he was fired (he worked for the church). He had tried to set fire to the organ by throwing hot coals on top of it, but he missed and another disaster was prevented.

In the renovation of the 1930s an automatic sprinkler system was installed in the tower, that could extinguish a fire up to an elevation in the tower of 70 meters.

Organ

The organ of the Sint-Bavo church (the "Christiaan Müller" organ) is one of the world's great organs. It was built by Christian Müller and Jan van Logteren, from Amsterdam, between 1735 and 1738; upon completion it was the largest organ in the world with 60 voices and 32-feet pedal-towers. In Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville describes the inside of a whale's mouth: :"Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes?"

Many famous people used this organ, including Mendelssohn, Händel and the 10-year old Mozart who played it in 1766.

The organ was modified a number of times in the 19th and 20th century. These changes were undone in the renovation between 1959 and 1961. Between 1987 and 2000 work was performed on the voicing of the organ. A local story goes to say that the bass of the organ was so low, the mortar in between the brimstones started to brittle to nothing.

External links

* [http://www.bavo.nl/bladen/orgelengels.htm] - More information on the Müller Organ.