To Stephane Dandois, an avid rock climber, it seemed like a fun idea: convert a church in the Brussels commune of Forest into a wall climbing club. Little did he imagine that his scheme from two and a ...

On October 25, 1555, the grandees of the Habsburg Netherlands gathered in the Great Hall of the Coudenberg Palace in Brussels to witness an extraordinary event. A weary old man with a grey beard and a ...

Contemporary Belgian politics often seems too complex for its good, but the political landscape in the Middle Ages and the early modern period could have been even more bizarre. Belgium was once a ...

Manneken-Pis, literally “little man pee,” in the Dutch dialect of Marols or “le petit Julien,” in French, is one of Brussels’ most famous and beloved citizens. But what’s the story behind this iconic, ...

When Charlotte Brontë left Brussels in 1844 after her two-year stay at the Pensionnat Heger, the future author of Jane Eyre returned to her Yorkshire village of Haworth with her head crammed with ...

It is fair to say that Laurent Simons is special. Last year, the 12-year-old child prodigy received his bachelor's degree in physics with distinction from the University of Antwerp, after completing ...

In its 16th-century pomp, Antwerp was at the hub of the known world. It was a cauldron of emperors, heretics, spies and killer bankers, all stirring religious, sexual and intellectual scandals.

Machetes, clubs, pickaxes and spears. These were the weapons used by Rwandans as they slaughtered their fellow countrymen during the 1994 genocide. They were used against colleagues, neighbours, ...

How successful are European countries at unifying their populations linguistically? What part does the spread of English in Eastern Europe play in NATO’s hybrid war against Russia. These and many ...

The final touches are being made to the world-famous flower carpet on the Grand Place, Brussels' main square. Over 100 volunteers started working early on Thursday to decorate the cobblestones with ...

All of Brussels can be seen as an open-air museum with streets, squares and parks adorned by historical statues and memorials, mostly meant to represent and even glorify Belgium’s past. But for a long ...

On a grey Belgian spring day, people in dark suits hurry up and down Antwerp’s Hoveniersstraat carrying black leather briefcases. Some pause to talk with one another for a moment, but in the city’s ...