Qualla: Toren van Goedereede

Toren van Goedereede: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris06, CC0. Before he was Pope Adrian VI - the last non-Italian pope until John Paul II, the only Dutch pope in history - Adriaan Florenszoon Boeyens was just the parish priest at Goedereede. He served the old Saint Catharina church here in the 1490s, a quiet posting at the mouth of the Haringvliet. The church he knew burned down in 1482; the giant brick tower that replaced it in 1512 still stands, and a bell cast inside it in 1519 still rings - hammered with the Latin inscription *Est mea vox grata, quia sum Maria vocata*, "My voice is welcome, because I am called Maria."

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Image: Chris06 | CC0

Toren van Goedereede: A Tower for a Town That Mattered

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerard Dukker, CC BY-SA 4.0. Goedereede in the early 1500s was a prosperous fishing and trading port on the South Holland coast, busy enough to demand the kind of parish church a wealthy burgher class wanted: a big one with a bigger tower. After the great fire of 1482 wiped out the old Saint Catharina and it...

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Image: Gerard Dukker | CC BY-SA 4.0

Toren van Goedereede: The Light

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerard Dukker, CC BY-SA 4.0. Forty years later, the tower got a second job. From 1552 it began serving as a lighthouse, and it stayed one - through changing technologies, changing ports, and the slow decline of the town that built it - for the next three hundred and sixty years. That tenure makes it one of t...

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Image: Gerard Dukker | CC BY-SA 4.0

Toren van Goedereede: Decommissioned

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris06, CC0. In 1912 the light went out. A new lighthouse - the West Head, the Vuurtoren Westhoofd, taller and better-placed at Ouddorp on the open sea - took over the job. The old Toren van Goedereede fell silent. For half a century the tower stood without purpose, a brick obelisk in a fishi...

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Image: Chris06 | CC0

Toren van Goedereede: Fifty Bells Over the Polders

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerard Dukker, CC BY-SA 4.0. The carillon grew. Six bass bells and seven treble bells were added in 1999, opening up the lower and higher registers. Two more bells came in 2010. By then the Goedereede carillon had fifty-two bells - one of the more capable concert instruments in a country that takes its caril...

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Image: Gerard Dukker | CC BY-SA 4.0