Vrouwekerk, Gothic church ruins in Leiden, Netherlands
Vrouwekerk is a medieval church ruin on Vrouwenkerkhof square in the center of Leiden, right across from Museum Boerhaave. What remains standing are sections of the Gothic walls and the foundations, which together still mark out the footprint of the original building in the middle of the city.
The building started as a small chapel around 1300 and grew into a parish church by 1365. After the Reformation it served as a shelter for Huguenot refugees and as a gathering place for reformed communities before it eventually fell into disuse and ruin.
The name comes from the Virgin Mary, to whom the original chapel was dedicated. The open square around the ruins still follows the outline of the old church floor, so visitors walking across it can get a sense of how large the building once was.
The ruins are reached through Vrouwenkerksteeg, a narrow alley connecting Haarlemmerstraat to the square. The site is open throughout the year and fits naturally into a walk through the old city center, as it sits close to several other historic buildings.
When archaeologists dug at the site in 1979, they found that the church foundations were built on wooden poles that had remained intact underground for centuries. This shows the technique that medieval builders used to put up heavy stone structures on Leiden's soft, waterlogged ground.
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