Qualla: Affligem Abbey

Affligem Abbey: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Periergeia, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 28 June 1062, six knights laid down their swords on a stretch of land in the Duchy of Brabant and agreed to live as hermits. They had grown tired, the chronicles say, of the violent way they had been making their way through the world. The land they chose was Affligem - twenty kilometers northwest of present-day Brussels, in a quiet corner of Hekelgem. The hermitage they founded became, within a generation, the most important monastery in all of Brabant, so important that contemporaries simply called it Primaria Brabantiae - the first of Brabant. The buildings you see today are the fourth or fifth iteration. Nine hundred years of survival are written into the walls.

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Image: Periergeia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Affligem Abbey: Six Knights and a Rule

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michielverbeek, CC BY-SA 3.0. The founding story is unusually specific for an 11th-century monastery. Six knights, names mostly lost, repented of their violent way of life and asked to live as hermits on land donated by Hermann II, Count Palatine of Lotharingia, and his guardian Anno II, archbishop of Cologne...

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Image: Michielverbeek | CC BY-SA 3.0

Affligem Abbey: A Queen Buried Here

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Traveler100, CC BY-SA 3.0. The counts of Brabant became Affligem's protectors almost from the start, and several of them chose to be buried inside its walls. Duke Godfrey I of Leuven was laid to rest here in 1139. His daughter Adeliza of Louvain, who had been Queen of England as the second wife of Henry I,...

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Image: Traveler100 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Affligem Abbey: Burned, Rebuilt, Burned Again

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JanVerhulst62, CC0. Affligem sat on the border with the county of Flanders, which is another way of saying it sat in the path of every army for nine centuries. Flemish troops destroyed the abbey twice during the War of the Brabantian Succession in the 14th century. The Romanesque basilica lost three...

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Image: JanVerhulst62 | CC0

Affligem Abbey: The Beer That Carries the Name

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fernando Losada Rodríguez, CC BY-SA 4.0. Affligem brewed beer almost from the beginning, as Benedictine houses did across Europe, and its name became one of the most recognized monastic beer brands in Belgium. The brewing tradition has had its own troubled history - the abbey itself was dissolved during the French Revol...

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Image: Fernando Losada Rodríguez | CC BY-SA 4.0

Affligem Abbey: What the Pilot Sees

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ArticCynda, CC BY-SA 4.0. Affligem Abbey sits on flat farmland west of the Brussels conurbation, near the N9 highway and the railway line that runs from Brussels to Ghent. From altitude, the long symmetrical 18th-century facade is the most recognizable feature, with two square courtyards forming a clear g...

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Image: ArticCynda | CC BY-SA 4.0