Qualla: Winschoten

Winschoten: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gijs Bolmeijer, CC BY-SA 4.0. There used to be a thriving Jewish community in Winschoten. The neighbors called the town Sodom — not as a compliment but as a complaint, because the Gentile half of the population kept what the Jewish half considered scandalous hours. By the eighteenth century the community was large enough to leave a permanent imprint on the local Gronings dialect, which still carries Yiddish and Hebrew loanwords on streetcorners where no Yiddish has been spoken aloud in eight decades. Four hundred and ninety-three Jews lived in Winschoten when the Second World War began. Twenty came home. The town the survivors found waiting was the same as before — three windmills on the skyline, the Saint Vitus church, three horizontal stripes on the municipal flag — and also not the same at all.

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Image: Gijs Bolmeijer | CC BY-SA 4.0

Winschoten: Last Town in the Kingdom

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerardus, CC0. Winschoten received city rights in 1825, the last municipality in the Netherlands ever to do so. By that point the designation was largely ceremonial — a courtesy paid to a town that had quietly become the commercial center of the Oldambt district. The flag, adopted by municipal ...

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Image: Gerardus | CC0

Winschoten: Three Mills Left of Thirteen

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michel Dellebeke, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the early eighteenth century thirteen windmills stood inside Winschoten's town boundary, enough that locals called the place Molenstad — Milltown. Three remain. Molen Edens at Nassaustraat 14 is the oldest mill anywhere in the province of Groningen, built in 1763 on the instru...

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Image: Michel Dellebeke | CC BY-SA 3.0

Winschoten: Sodom and Plate Lickers

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cookie Nguyen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The town acquired two unflattering nicknames over the centuries. One, mentioned earlier, was Sodom — apparently coined by Jewish residents shocked by the drinking and revelry they observed among Gentile neighbors. The other, tellerlikkers, plate lickers, allegedly came from the l...

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Image: Cookie Nguyen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Winschoten: The Transit Port

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wimmensinga, Public domain. During the Second World War, Winschoten was used as a transit point for the deportation of Jews from northern Netherlands across the German border. The trains east left the railway station that had opened in 1868 to serve the Groningen–Winschoten–Nieuweschans line. Of the 493 Jew...

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Image: Wimmensinga | Public domain

Winschoten: Running a Hundred Kilometers

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donald Trung, CC BY-SA 4.0. Every September, on the second Saturday of the month, Winschoten hosts De RUN — the oldest ultramarathon in the Netherlands, founded in 1976. The course is a ten-kilometer paved lap repeated ten times through the town. The standing 100 km record, set by the Belgian ultrarunner Je...

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Image: Donald Trung | CC BY-SA 4.0