Amsterdam is a city invented in defiance of nature. Where there should have been sea, they built a city. Where there should have been mud, they dug canals. Where there should have been boredom, they made Rembrandt.
A city that
stands on piles
Millions of wooden piles, a dam on the Amstel and more than seven centuries of stubbornness.
Amsterdam stands on wooden piles driven into marshy ground — by some counts about 11 million of them. There are more than eight thousand under Central Station, and 13,659 under the Royal Palace on Dam Square. Scandinavian pine piles last for centuries as long as they never meet the air: underwater, wood does not rot. The whole city hovers above the bog — and does not sink.
The name “Amsterdam” literally means “dam on the Amstel river”. In 1275 the Count of Holland freed the fishing village by that dam from road tolls — the date counted as the city’s birthday. Some three and a half centuries later Amsterdam had become the trading capital of the world.
Merchants, maids
and anatomists
Spices from Asia, one of the first joint-stock companies — and painters who painted ordinary people.
Amsterdam’s Golden Age was the seventeenth century. The Dutch East India Company — one of the first joint-stock companies in history — became the greatest trading power of its day. Ships brought spices from Asia, silk, porcelain, silver. Money flowed like water — and was spent on art.
This was when Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer and Frans Hals were at work. They did not paint kings and gods — they painted ordinary people: merchants, maids, anatomists at work. It was a revolutionary way of seeing, and it changed painting for ever.
Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam — his house survives and is now a museum. He was rich and famous, then went bankrupt, lost the house and died almost in poverty. He outlived his wife Saskia, his companion Hendrickje and his son Titus, who died a year before his father. But he painted to the very end — dozens of self-portraits, as if trying to understand who he was.
Johannes Vermeer:
master of ordinary light
Some thirty-odd paintings, light from a window and a silence that stops people in the middle of a museum.
Remarkably little is known about Vermeer for so great a painter. Born in Delft in 1632. Lived to 43. About 35 of his paintings survive — and in each there is something inexplicable.
He painted ordinary scenes: a woman reading a letter by a window, a girl with a pearl earring glancing over her shoulder, a maid pouring milk. No mythology, no kings. Only light from a window — nearly always from the left — and silence.
Scholars still argue about whether Vermeer used a camera obscura to achieve such precision of light and perspective. Perhaps. But no camera explains why his paintings still stop people in the middle of a museum — and they stand there in silence.
Peter the Great
and a Dutch lesson
A tsar who came to learn how to build ships — and learned how to build cities.
In 1697 the twenty-five-year-old Russian tsar Peter I came to the Netherlands incognito, as Pyotr Mikhailov, a simple carpenter. He wanted to learn shipbuilding with his own hands. For several months he worked in the shipyards of Zaandam and Amsterdam, building ships alongside the workmen.
Holland astonished him. Canals instead of streets, drainage, cleanliness, order, trade. The tsar wrote everything down: how dykes were built, how marshes were drained, how cities were planned.
Back in Russia, Peter began building a new capital — Saint Petersburg — in the Neva delta, among marshes and islands, much like Amsterdam. Canals, islands, bridges: the echo of the tsar’s Dutch impressions can still be heard in Petersburg. He invited foreign masters — the Swiss Domenico Trezzini, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Le Blond, Dutch shipwrights and engineers. And the Kunstkamera grew out of the Dutch cabinets of curiosities: Peter bought entire collections in Amsterdam.
Peter came to learn how to build ships. He learned how to build cities. Amsterdam became the template for Petersburg — and you feel the connection standing by any Petersburg canal.Secrets Service · Amsterdam
Almost one for every resident. More than a third of all trips are made by bike. Bike theft is practically a national sport.
In 1715 the painting was trimmed to fit the town hall. Several figures vanished for ever.
If the groundwater drops, the piles meet the air and start to rot — so the city keeps its water level under constant watch.
A city on water,
seven hundred years old
Today Amsterdam is home to people of nearly two hundred nationalities and is one of Europe’s great financial and cultural centres. And yet it is a cosy city where you can get lost in seventeenth-century streets and never want to leave. The canals reflect the facades, bicycle bells ring, someone on a bridge eats herring with onions — the traditional Dutch street food.
A city on piles, in a swamp, on the water — standing for more than seven hundred years. And going nowhere.
What to know before you go
The Rijksmuseum is the country’s greatest museum: The Night Watch by Rembrandt and The Milkmaid by Vermeer. Book tickets online in advance — the queues are huge. The Van Gogh Museum is next door — don’t miss it. The best way to get around is by bike; you can hire one on every corner.
Try herring at any street stall. Put a stroopwafel on top of a cup of hot coffee and wait for the caramel to melt. These are not tourist tips — they are rituals. The Anne Frank House at Prinsengracht 263 is a place you must visit. Quiet, small and very important. Tickets online only, ideally several weeks ahead.
Girl
with a Pearl Earring
Johannes Vermeer, around 1665 — and Valeria, 2013.
At the Mauritshuis in The Hague she hangs in a small room. She is small — 44 by 39 centimetres. But the gaze is enormous. The girl looks over her shoulder, lips slightly parted, a pearl at her ear. Three and a half centuries — and that gaze still stops you.
We don’t know who she is. We don’t know her name. Perhaps Vermeer’s own daughter, Maria. Perhaps an imagined face. Not knowing is what makes her so alive: everyone sees someone of their own in her.
My wife Irina and I saw the painting at the Mauritshuis together, then watched the film again at home — and both thought of the same turn of the head. We didn’t shoot it straight away, but in January 2013, in the St Petersburg studio of photographer Oleg Zotov: we put the look together as a family, our older daughter Lilya and Irina found the turban and earring in their own jewellery, Katya Bobkova did the make-up, and Zotov himself stood at the lights that day. Valeria, who stood by the window, was twelve. One frame — no more were needed.
Three and a half centuries separate Vermeer and this photograph. And yet — the same light from the left window, the same glance over the shoulder.
