Kerstmarkt Thorn

For more than eight hundred years, this little town was its own country, and it was ruled by women.

Around the year 975 the Bishop of Utrecht, Ansfried, founded a convent here, on swampy ground near an old Roman road. Over time it became something unusual: a secular abbey of noblewomen, led by a princess-abbess, with a chapter of no more than twenty ladies from the highest nobility. They governed a tiny sovereign state inside the Holy Roman Empire, with its own courts and even its own coins. Thirty-three princess-abbesses ruled in turn.

The great white church at the centre was their abbey church. Its oldest parts go back to the tenth century; inside it is full Baroque.

It all ended with the French. Their armies arrived in the winter of 1794, and in 1797 the abbey and its little state were abolished. The noble ladies left.

Here is where the white comes from. The French introduced a tax based on how many windows your house had. Poorer families bricked up windows to pay less, and then painted their houses white to hide the patched brickwork. What began as a cover-up for poverty became the look that makes Thorn famous.

So, as you walk the cobbled streets between the stalls, every white wall is a small piece of that story.