Utrecht The Hermits: Suster Bertken

The most famous hermit in Utrecht was Sister Bertken.

Sister Bertken was born in Utrecht in the year 1426 or 1427 with the name Berta Jacobsdaughter and by that is meant Jacob van Lichtenberch.

Probably she chose for the life of a hermit because she had found out that she was a bastard. When she was 30 (1457) she was locked up in the hermitage of the Buur church and stayed there till her death in 1514 when she was 87 years old.

Her day plan consisted of praying, attending the mess, writing poems, advice people, doing needlework.

She lived a vegetarian life and her clothes consisted of a simple skirt and a coarse dress and naked feet without any form of heating in her hermitage.

In these times a renovation of the Buurkerk was planned and after her death the hermitage was pulled down and her grave destroyed. At another spot a new vault was made.

However, in 1579 also the holy cross choir was broken down and next to the Buurkerk the Choorstraat (Choirstreet) was erected.

In the Choorstreet Suster Bertken’s grave should be somewhere , but it is not for sure where it is exactly.

Now a stone is laid with the text: “Sister Bertken lived here as a hermit locked up in a niche in the bricked wall 1457-1514.wall

At the foot of the stone you see a map of the church and a golden dot shows the place where the hermitage should have been.

On the pictures the hermitage console corner Choorstraat/Vismarkt ; a book cover of Sister Bertken (Royal Library /Kon. Bibl.) and the grave stone in the Choorstraat

Utrecht Dom Towers (small)

There is one building in Utrecht that’s famous all over the tourist’s guides and

forms the skyline of the city.

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It’s the Dom Tower.

The tower is built on the place where the Romans erected their ’castellum’.

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The tower stands alone now, but was once a part of the Dom Church.

During a disaster in 1674 the church was partly blown away but the tower survived

The Dom Tower is the highest tower of the Netherlands (112,5 meters).

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Of course the tower is subject of more or less touristic souvenirs.

One of them are the “Domtorentjes” (Dom towers), chocolate with a cream centre and can be bought in the shopping street close to the Dom Tower.

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In the future more (serious) facts about the Dom in this weblog.