Qualla: Siegen

Siegen: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 28 June 1577, in a house in Siegen owned by a family in temporary exile from religious troubles in Antwerp, a Westphalian midwife handed Maria Pypelinckx her newborn son. The baby was Peter Paul Rubens, and the city he was born in - this tight basin of dark hills and dark iron, where the river Sieg pulls out of the Rothaargebirge and starts its westward run toward the Rhine - has been claiming him ever since. Rubens is one of three things Siegen is famous for. The others are iron and the Orange-Nassau. All three of them are still here, in the museum cases, in the slag heaps under the forest, in the streets renamed for Dutch kings.

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Siegen: A City Mostly Made of Trees

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Siegen looks compact on a map but covers about 115 square kilometres, and roughly sixty per cent of it is forest. That makes it one of the greenest big cities in Germany - a place where you can ride a bus from the main station and be walking under beeches within twenty minutes. T...

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Siegen: Iron Country

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The river Sieg gives the city its name - a Celtic word, probably - and iron gives it almost everything else. Mining here goes back to La Tene times, more than two thousand years ago; the surrounding mountains are still pierced with old adits and shaft heads, some now hiking attra...

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Siegen: The House That Made the Netherlands

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For most of its history Siegen was a Nassau city, ruled from the Obere Schloss on the Siegberg by Counts of Nassau-Siegen and their related branches. One of those branches turned out to be world-historical: through marriage and inheritance the Nassau line acquired the French prin...

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Siegen: A Painter Born, a City Burned

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Rubens's family stayed in Siegen only briefly. The boy was raised mainly in Cologne and then in Antwerp, where he became the most sought-after painter in northern Europe, but his birthplace has not forgotten him: nine of his works hang in the Rubens Hall of the Siegerlandmuseum, ...

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