Burghers’ Lodge

This guide to the Burghers' Lodge in Bruges starts with the small stone bear above the corner door on Academiestraat, watching Jan van Eyck square since the fourteen hundreds, and traces the merchant hall built between roughly thirteen ninety-five and fourteen seventeen for the city's wealthiest traders to entertain foreign visitors. It follows the poorters who once read a season's fortunes from this tower before cargo even reached shore, and the painters, Van Eyck and later Memling among them, whose careers grew alongside their trading money. It also carries the building through a fire in seventeen fifty-five and the silting of the Zwin channel that changed everything for Bruges. Stand in the square and look up at the tower that once watched the harbor.