Culture

Symbols

The national colour is orange, after the royal House of Orange-Nassau. The flag is red, white and blue: in the 17th century the orange stripe gave way to red. The national anthem, the “Wilhelmus”, was written between 1568 and 1572 and is counted among the oldest anthems in the world.

Painting

• Rembrandt painted The Night Watch (1642), which hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
• Johannes Vermeer painted Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665), now in the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
• Vincent van Gogh is best seen at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, home to the largest collection of his work.
• Piet Mondrian belonged to De Stijl (1917): straight black lines and pure red, yellow and blue.
• M. C. Escher made prints of impossible figures and never-ending staircases.

Science

• Christiaan Huygens discovered Saturn’s moon Titan (1655) and invented the pendulum clock (1656).
• Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first to see microorganisms, in the 1670s, through microscopes he made himself.
• Edsger Dijkstra devised his shortest-path algorithm in 1956. Satnavs and internet routers still rely on it.
• Guido van Rossum created the Python programming language; the first version came out in 1991.

The oldest university in the country is Leiden, founded in 1575.

Bicycles

There are about 23 million bicycles in the country, more than there are people, and roughly 35,000 km of cycle paths. People cycle to school, to work and to the shops in any weather. Next to Utrecht Central station is the world’s largest bicycle parking garage, with 12,500 spaces.

Tulips

Tulips came to Europe from the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. In 1593 the botanist Carolus Clusius planted them in the botanical garden in Leiden. Some forty years later came tulip mania: in 1636–37 a single bulb of a rare variety could cost as much as a house. Today the Netherlands is the world’s largest flower exporter, and every spring about 7 million bulbs bloom at Keukenhof.

Food

• Stroopwafels are thin waffles with a caramel syrup filling, originally from Gouda.
• Gouda and Edam cheeses are named after the towns where they were traded.
• Herring is eaten lightly salted and raw, with chopped onion, held up by the tail.
• Hagelslag are chocolate sprinkles scattered on buttered bread for breakfast.
• Stamppot is a winter dish of potatoes mashed with kale or other vegetables, served with smoked sausage.

Holidays

• 27 April, King’s Day (Koningsdag), is Willem-Alexander’s birthday. The country dresses in orange and the streets turn into one big flea market.
• 5 May, Liberation Day, marks the end of the German occupation in 1945.
• 5 December, Sinterklaas, is an evening of presents from Saint Nicholas and the biggest children’s celebration of the year.

Dutch words in English

In the 17th century the Dutch were Europe’s leading seafarers and traders, and English borrowed many of their words. Dutch place names also survive in New York: Brooklyn and Harlem are named after the towns of Breukelen and Haarlem.

English	From Dutch
yacht	jacht
skipper	schipper
cruise	kruisen
boss	baas
cookie	koekje
coleslaw	koolsla
landscape	landschap
skate	schaats
brandy	brandewijn
Santa Claus	Sinterklaas

Brandy comes from brandewijn, literally “burnt wine”.