Qualla: Losser

Losser: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michielverbeek, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 21 September 1665, troops from the Bishopric of Munster crossed the border into Twente and set fire to both halves of a village called Losser. The town - already old enough to appear in tenth-century records - was almost entirely destroyed. What rebuilt itself on the ashes is a quiet Dutch border town of about 23,000 today, but Losser has held onto a few unusually specific things: a five-hundred-year-old church tower that survives because the rest of the church was demolished around it, the only Syriac Orthodox monastery in Europe, and an 85-meter hill that Tacitus may have written about under a different name almost two thousand years ago.

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Image: Michielverbeek | CC BY-SA 3.0

Losser: The Year the Bishop Came

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michielverbeek, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bernhard von Galen, the Prince-Bishop of Munster, was a particular kind of seventeenth-century churchman - one who preferred armies to homilies. In 1665 his troops swept into the eastern Netherlands as part of a war with the Dutch Republic, and the small unfortified villages alon...

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Image: Michielverbeek | CC BY-SA 3.0

Losser: A Syriac Monastery in Glane

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gouwenaar, Public domain. Out at the edge of town, in the village of Glane near the German border, sits something nearly no one expects to find in the Netherlands: the Mor Ephrem Monastery, the only Syriac Orthodox monastery in Europe. The building started life in 1911 as the St Olaf monastery, founded by...

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Image: Gouwenaar | Public domain

Losser: The Highest Point in Overijssel

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Janwillemvanaalst, CC BY-SA 4.0. A few kilometers west of the village of De Lutte, the land does something it rarely does in Overijssel: it goes up. The Tankenberg crests at 85 meters, which is enough to be the highest point in the entire province. In a country defined by flatness this is genuinely a hill, with ...

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Image: Janwillemvanaalst | CC BY-SA 4.0

Losser: The River and the Border

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The Dinkel, the river that defines Losser's geography, rises in Germany and meanders north into the Netherlands, flooding its meadows in winter and drawing canoeists and birdwatchers in summer. The municipality straddles the river and runs right up to the German border - close en...

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Image: Public domain

Losser: People From Here

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rauenstein, CC BY-SA 3.0. Losser's most internationally known native is probably Pi de Bruijn, born in 1942, the architect behind the renovation of the Dutch House of Representatives chamber in The Hague among many other public buildings. Kim Kotter, born in Losser in 1982, won the Miss Netherlands title ...

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Image: Rauenstein | CC BY-SA 3.0