Qualla: Groningen (province)

Groningen (province): Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The city of Groningen and the countryside around it have never quite settled the question of which one is the real Groningen. For most of the early modern period they barely spoke to each other except in lawsuits. The city, a self-governing trade hub on the southern edge of the province, treated the surrounding farmland as a captive market and a captive labor pool. The farmland, organized into ancient regions with their own dialects and customs, treated the city as a tax collector with delusions of grandeur. When the two were forced together into a single province of the Dutch Republic in the sixteenth century, the official name acknowledged the unresolved fight: Stad en Lande, City and Countryside. The province is still called Groningen. But the rural half is still called something else - the Ommelanden, the surroundings - and the gap, four hundred years on, has narrowed but not closed.

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Image: Public domain

Groningen (province): The Wierden of the North

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michielverbeek, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cross the Reitdiep canal heading north and you enter the Hogeland, the 'High Land' that is high only by Dutch standards. The clay underfoot was deposited by the Wadden Sea over centuries, and the villages here sit on artificial mounds called wierden - earthen platforms a few mete...

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Image: Michielverbeek | CC BY-SA 3.0

Groningen (province): Slochteren and the Gas

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gouwenaar, Public domain. In 1959, near the village of Slochteren in what is now Midden-Groningen, a Dutch oil exploration crew drilled what they expected to be a routine well. They found one of the largest natural gas fields in Europe. For the next half-century the Slochteren field paid for an enormous p...

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Image: Gouwenaar | Public domain

Groningen (province): Oldambt and the Big Farms

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dickelbers, CC BY-SA 4.0. The eastern Ommelanden tell a different story. In the Oldambt region, nineteenth-century landlords accumulated enormous holdings of grain land worked by seasonal laborers, who lived in conditions so harsh and so visible that the Oldambt became one of the last strongholds of the D...

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Image: Dickelbers | CC BY-SA 4.0

Groningen (province): Bourtange and Borgen

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Baykedevries, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the German border, the star-shaped fortress of Bourtange sits in a moat that has held for three and a half centuries. It was built in 1593 to control the road between Groningen and the Spanish-held east, and it has been preserved in almost original form as an open-air museum. ...

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Image: Baykedevries | CC BY-SA 4.0

Groningen (province): The City

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit nl:Gebruiker:Ra-smit, colour adapted by User:Lyzzy, CC BY-SA 3.0. And then there is the city of Groningen itself: a university town of brick and water, with one of the most lively student nightlife districts in the country and the largest church in the province. The Martinikerk on the Grote Markt dates from the thirteenth century, and its 97-me...

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Image: nl:Gebruiker:Ra-smit, colour adapted by User:Lyzzy | CC BY-SA 3.0