Nostalgische Kerstmarkt Leiden

The water under this market is the Rhine. Not a canal named after it: the river itself, or what is left of its oldest course to the sea.

Two thousand years ago this branch, now called the Oude Rijn, was the main lower Rhine. It was also the northern border of the Roman Empire. The Romans built a chain of forts along its banks, and one of them, Matilo, stood just upstream from here, in what is now Leiderdorp. Beyond the river was the unconquered north.

Over the centuries the river silted up and lost its strength, and the people of Holland tamed it with dikes, locks and, from 1408, windmills to pump the water away. In Leiden it splits in two. The Nieuwe Rijn, the New Rhine, branches off and rejoins the other arm in the city centre. This market floats on that branch.

Look for the covered bridge, the Koornbrug. A bridge has stood there since the fifteenth century. The first stone of the present one was laid on the fifteenth of December 1642, which makes this its birthday month. In 1824 it got its two classical roofs, so grain traders could sell their corn on the bridge without it getting wet.

So you are shopping on a stretch of water where Roman soldiers once kept watch and grain merchants once haggled, in a city that has been trading on the Rhine for as long as it has existed.