Oude Kerk

In front of you stands the oldest building in Amsterdam. By around 1213 there was already a wooden chapel here, and in 1306 a stone church was consecrated to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of sailors. Over the centuries it kept growing, chapel by chapel and vault by vault, as the city grew richer.

1From Catholic to Calvinist

In 1566 the wave of iconoclasm that swept the Low Countries destroyed almost all its images and altars. In 1578, with the so-called Alteration, Amsterdam switched to the Protestant side and the Oude Kerk became a Reformed church, which it still is today. That is why the interior looks so bare: what survives of the Catholic decoration is mainly the stained glass and the wooden vaults.

2A church that is a cemetery

The floor is made up of around 2,500 gravestones, covering tens of thousands of people. Burials inside the church went on until 1865. Among them are Saskia van Uylenburgh, Rembrandt's wife, buried in 1642, and the composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, who was organist here for decades.

The city's oldest church sits in the heart of its most famous district, and nobody has ever seen a contradiction in that.

The alleys of the Red Light District literally wrap around its walls. It reflects a pragmatic port city that lived side by side with newly landed sailors and everything they brought with them.

3What to look out for

• The little houses built against the church walls, some of them centuries old.
• The statue 'Belle', dedicated in 2007 to sex workers all over the world.
• The bronze relief set among the cobblestones of the square, a hand on a breast, placed there anonymously.