The church built from the sea

In most places you build a church from what the local area provides: brick, stone, timber from the woods. On Vlieland there was no woodland, no quarry and no clay. What we did have washed ashore.

The Nicolaaskerk was therefore literally raised from the sea.

What you see inside

Several pews are made of beachcombed timber — washed-up wood, often from wrecked ships. A panel on the pulpit shows that it was once a ship's hatch door. Pillars were fashioned from a former ship's mast.

That was not a makeshift solution of poverty that only became charming in retrospect. It is simply how an island community built: you took what the sea brought, and the sea brought more to the Vlie than anywhere else, because this was one of the busiest shipping routes in Europe. Every piece of wood in this building first sailed somewhere else.

Then there are the chandeliers. According to tradition, they were presented by the King of Sweden and by Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter. That sounds improbable until you consider how this island was situated in the world: the Rede van Vlieland was the staging post for the Baltic, and Swedish trade passed right past here. De Ruyter himself was once a whaler — a line of work that was entirely ordinary on Vlieland.

And then the most unusual feature: six whale jawbones.

Grave markers from a whale

In the churchyard, lower jawbones of the bowhead whale once stood upright in the ground as grave markers. Details of the deceased were carved into the top.

That is a custom you encounter almost nowhere else. On Schiermonnikoog there are also whale jawbones, but not as grave markers. Vlielanders probably adopted the idea from the Scandinavians — and that suited an island whose men sailed on whaling voyages to Greenland and Spitsbergen. Those who lived from the whale buried their dead with the whale.

Acid rain damaged the bone, which is why the undamaged specimens were brought indoors. They now stand inside the church, in a corner near the entrance. A replica stands in the churchyard.

The building itself

A chapel stood on this site from the Middle Ages, first recorded in 1245. According to the church archives, the present church dates from 1607 and was built as an aisleless church, at the time when West-Vlieland was emptying and the population moved to Oost-Vlieland — a larger building was simply needed.

In 1647 the church was converted into a cruciform church, and nothing substantial has been altered since. That makes it one of the oldest originally Protestant church buildings in the Netherlands: not a repurposed Catholic church, but erected from the outset as a Protestant building.

The wooden barrel roof has tie-beams with carved inscriptions. The organ dates from around 1780. The Ten Commandments boards are from 1737 and were restored in 2007; despite research, it was never discovered who painted them.

The name Nicolaaskerk is more recent than you might expect. It was only adopted in 1997, when the building had existed in its current form for three hundred and fifty years — a reference to the medieval Nicolaaskapel that once stood here. Nicholas is the patron saint of seafarers. That, too, fits.

If you visit

The church is the only one on the island and is regularly open to visitors, with guided tours on set mornings. Current times can be found on the website of the Stichting Nicolaaskerk, which manages the building.

The woodwork is a distinctive part of the interior. When you know where it came from, you look at a pew rather differently.