Our Lord in The Attic

Front of Our Lord In The Attic Our Lord In The Attic Is The Building on the left of the lane. Photo by Jean Robert Thibault

A highlight of any trip to Amsterdam for me is going back into the hidden church and going up those creaky centuries old stairs into another time. The colors and filtering of the light take you backwards through time, even the air smells other and it feels like you are closer to the lost golden age of Amsterdam than almost anywhere else.

Our Lord in the Attic (Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder) is a Catholic Church, a three floor space, built in the attic of a large canal house in Amsterdam in the 17th Century. On the outside the house looks like any other of the wealthy merchant houses that were and are still there in Amsterdam there is nothing to say from the outside that this was a church with room for about 150 people which functioned for over two hundred years.

Church from below. Photo by Lewis Martin.

Church from above Photo by Lewis Martin.

It is on its own a intensely strange architectural wonder and answering why it was it hidden in an attic as it turns out tells us something about Dutch culture then and even now.1


Digram of the inside of the House.

In 17th Century Amsterdam it was forbidden to worship as a Catholic. It was after the reformation that had split Europe and indeed split the Spanish Netherlands from which the Dutch Republic emerged. We are approaching the zenith of the Golden Age of Dutch trade and empire building, of free thought and art which had a fundamentally different outlook from before.

Catholic churches and monasteries had been confiscated. However there was a principle of freedom of conscience in the Netherlands and in theory people could think and believe what they wanted behind their front door. Not only that but Amsterdam was a center of trade and cultural exchange with large emigre populations of Calvanists, Huguenots and Jews amongst many other meant that it must have been well understood that while there was of course’ only the true Protestant faith that other faiths must be in some way tolerated even as they were frowned upon and discriminated against.

So in Amsterdam there was an strange environment at the time where Catholicism was officially outlawed but tolerated behind closed doors. In this atmosphere the wealthy German Catholic merchant Jan Hartman commissioned the church in his own attic and it was finished in 1663.2 So Our Lord in the Attic was a hidden church known about by everyone but tolerated as it was built behind a private dwelling.

Chanelling the 17th Century. Photo by Lewis Martin.

This legal but not legal, hidden but not hidden, seen but unseen contradiction is a fascinating way to balance two seemingly opposed ideas. It’s a seeming feature of Dutch culture too. The hidden church was finished in 1663, but full three hundred years later people were coming to Amsterdam to smoke weed in coffee shops where again it was not legal but legal, hidden but unhidden. The Dutch licence in Amsterdam of the red light district is perhaps another example of this tolerance of something while not actually approving of it. The Dutch name for this drug policy gedoogbeleid or literally toleration policy’ allowed the coffee shops to gently live in a grey area of the law as the hidden church had done three hundred years before.

The hidden Church is thus more than a strange anomaly but a kind of a materialised example of the Dutch way of tolerating and allowing something they actually opposed.

It is tolerance but in a different sense of what we normally mean by it. Since I have lived there and moved away I always was struck by it in different forms as I experienced it as an expat. I found an article which explains it nicely. In Dutch Tolerance: Something to Learn from? by Uwe Becker3 he proposes two types of tolerance. One in which different beliefs or practises are considered equal, think of the American constitutions First Amendment for example. But the second where a deviant belief is tolerated by the majority segment of society. This is of course a pragmatic by relativistic strategy with it’s own advantage and pitfalls.

Our Lord in The Attic is one of two surviving hidden churches in Amsterdam. It was already the end of the 18th C I think when Catholics were openly allowed to worship again in the Netherlands and as the church congregations found or built churches they were removed. Our Lord in The Attic was purchased and opened as a museum by it’s parishioners so was preserved.

Architect Felix Claus designed an extension to the house in 2015. The museum purchased the house next door and remade it with an underground link to the original building to preserve the street layout. The extension provides a kind of sculpted minimalist take of a dutch townhouse with beautiful scale and views.

⚲ location: 52°22’30.3”N 4°53’57.8”E

The Front reception room typical of a golden age rich merchant of the time. Photo By Lewis Martin

Other Hidden Churches in Amsterdam

From the article Hidden Catholic Churches in Amsterdam ~ Liturgical Arts Journal a short list of other hidden churches in Amsterdam.

  • Saint Ursula in the Amsterdam Beguinage surviving
  • Geloof, Hoop en Liefde (demolished in 1817)
  • Mozes en Aäron (demolished in 1839)
  • De Ster (demolished in 1848)
  • De Boom (demolished in 1911)
  • De Franse Kerk (demolished in 1912)

Tiles from a wall in the hidden church. Photo by Lewis Martin


  1. Just me spitballing really but I think there is something to it.↩︎

  2. Jan Hartman (1619-1668), a well-to-do Catholic merchant, buys the house on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal on 10 May 1661, together with the two adjacent houses in the alley behind. The transaction costs him 16,000 guilders. Originally from Germany, Hartman takes up residence with his wife Elisabeth and their children -via

    ↩︎
  3. See Uwe Becker, Dutch Tolerance: Something to Learn from? (2011)(https://www.e-ir.info/2011/09/01/dutch-tolerance-something-to-learn-from/) [date accessed 2024-10-19]↩︎



Date
October 21, 2024