Qualla: Wilrijk

Wilrijk: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Funkyxian, CC BY-SA 4.0. The people of Wilrijk took the insult and made it into a parade. In 1895, after a contested town council election, the liberal party called the Catholic-voting villagers Geitekoppen - Goat Heads - because everyone in Wilrijk kept a goat behind the house for milk and meat. It was meant to wound. Within a generation it had become a title of honour. By 1965, when Wilrijk celebrated its 1,200th anniversary, the town organised a full Goat Parade with decorated carts, costumes, dancers, and goats as actual goats. It still happens every five years. The most recent edition, in 2025, ran with 1,500 costumed participants. Few places have turned a class slur into a public festival quite so completely.

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Image: Funkyxian | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wilrijk: Deep Time on the Bist

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DRG-fan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Long before there were goats, there were Celts. Excavations in Wilrijk uncovered a Celtic burial site dated to around 600 BCE - the oldest evidence of human settlement found anywhere in the Antwerp region. The triangular central square of Wilrijk, the Bist, traces the layout of a...

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Image: DRG-fan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wilrijk: Little Castles of the Antwerp Rich

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Havang(nl), CC0. From the late fifteenth century, when Antwerp displaced Bruges as northern Europe's commercial capital, the city's prosperous families began building country houses - hoven van plaisantie, 'pleasure estates' - in the villages around it. Wilrijk became one of the favourite spots. ...

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Image: Havang(nl) | CC0

Wilrijk: The Forts That Brought the Trains

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kristina D.C. Hoeppner, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the 1860s, as the new Kingdom of Belgium fortified Antwerp against potential French invasion, two of the famous outer-ring forts of the Antwerp redoubt - Fort 6 and Fort 7 - were built in the fields around Wilrijk. The forts brought roads, railways, even a station, and tied th...

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Image: Kristina D.C. Hoeppner | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wilrijk: The Long Boy of the Cabbage Patch

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Caroline Smits, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wilrijk's folkloric mascot is Lange Wapper, a mythical figure who appears across Flemish folk tales but whom Wilrijk claims as a native son. The story has Wapper born on the field of a farmer named Peer-January, between the Hoven van plaisantie of De Brandt and Middelheim. The fa...

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Image: Caroline Smits | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wilrijk: Compressors and a Mosque

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abdel Sinoctou, CC BY-SA 3.0. Modern Wilrijk is industrial in a way nineteenth-century farmers would have struggled to imagine. The Atlas Copco Airpower plant is the largest manufacturing facility for air compressors anywhere in the world; in 2005 it employed 2,300 people. Rizla, the cigarette-paper maker tha...

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Image: Abdel Sinoctou | CC BY-SA 3.0