Qualla: Nieuwe Toren, Kampen

Nieuwe Toren, Kampen: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gouwenaar, CC0. The drawing was supposed to crown the Town Hall of Amsterdam, the building that would later become the Royal Palace on the Dam. Instead, Philips Vingboons's elegant octagonal lantern ended up here, in Kampen, perched on a brick stump along the Oudestraat. From the cobbles below, you cannot tell that you are looking at a piece of Amsterdam's unbuilt grandeur. You can only hear the consequence: every seven and a half minutes, daytime, the bells inside it speak.

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Image: Gouwenaar | CC0

Nieuwe Toren, Kampen: A Tower Out of Place

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gouwenaar, CC0. Kampen began the Nieuwe Toren in 1649. The lower courses of brick rose under the hand of Dirck Janzn, a master carpenter and mill-maker from Edam, but the design that would give the tower its silhouette came from somewhere unexpected. Vingboons, one of the Dutch Golden Age's lead...

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Image: Gouwenaar | CC0

Nieuwe Toren, Kampen: The Voice of François Hemony

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pa3ems, CC BY-SA 3.0. The bells came before the tower could hold them. Between 1659 and 1662, François Hemony, the bell-founder whose name became almost synonymous with the Dutch carillon, cast thirty bells for Kampen. With nowhere finished to put them, they hung temporarily in the tower of the town h...

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Image: Pa3ems | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nieuwe Toren, Kampen: The Brass Drum

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Basvb (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Inside the tower sits a brass drum, cast by François Hemony in 1661, that does not stop working. It is the mechanical heart of an automatic playing mechanism driven by the tower clock, and it triggers the bells every seven and a half minutes during the day. Carillonneurs once cha...

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Image: Basvb (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nieuwe Toren, Kampen: Beetles and Restoration

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit E. Hupkes, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. In 2008, the carillon had to come down. The death-watch beetle, that small wood-boring insect with a name that sounds like a Gothic novel, had been at work for years in the oak frame of the upper tower. Every original beam needed replacing. The bells were lowered, the timber was ...

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Image: E. Hupkes | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Nieuwe Toren, Kampen: The Cow and the Joke

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A. J. van der Wal, CC BY-SA 4.0. Every summer, during the Kamper Ui(t)-dagen festival, a wooden cow appears in the Nieuwe Toren, hoisted into view. It is a wink at the Kamper uien, the centuries-old cycle of self-deprecating jokes the people of Kampen tell about themselves and which other Dutch towns have happil...

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Image: A. J. van der Wal | CC BY-SA 4.0