Ypres

Ypres is first mentioned by name in 1066 and probably takes its name from the Ieperlee, the small river on whose banks it was founded. In the Middle Ages it was one of the great cloth towns of Flanders, third in the county after Ghent and Bruges, with a population of about 40,000 in 1200; its textiles reached the markets of Novgorod, and its trade with England earned a mention in the Canterbury Tales. The Cloth Hall, built mainly between 1200 and 1304, served as its market and warehouse. The town was besieged by an English crusading army in 1383, became the seat of a new diocese in 1561, and was taken by Louis XIV in 1678, after which Vauban rebuilt its fortifications.

In the First World War Ypres stood in the path of the German advance and became the centre of the Ypres Salient, surrounded on three sides and shelled for most of the war. The Second Battle of Ypres began on 22 April 1915 with the first German use of poison gas, chlorine, and mustard gas, later called Yperite after the town, was first used nearby in 1917. The Third Battle, Passchendaele, cost nearly half a million casualties on all sides for a few miles of ground. By 1918 the town had been all but obliterated.

Winston Churchill proposed leaving the ruins as a memorial, but the townspeople rebuilt, using German reparations to reconstruct the Grote Markt, the Cloth Hall and the town hall as close to the originals as possible. The Menin Gate was unveiled in 1927. In 1940 the Germans occupied the town again until the 1st Polish Armoured Division liberated it on 6 September 1944.

Remembrance shapes the town's identity. At eight every evening traffic stops at the Menin Gate while buglers of the Last Post Association sound the Last Post for the soldiers of the British Empire who died in the Salient. The ceremony was banned during the German occupation and moved to Brookwood Military Cemetery in England, then resumed under the gate on the very evening of liberation in 1944. In 1920 King George V awarded the Military Cross to the city, one of only two municipalities to receive it, and between the wars British veterans of the Ypres League turned the town into a place of pilgrimage. British soldiers called it "Wipers" and named their trench newspaper The Wipers Times.

The town also keeps a stranger medieval memory. Cats, once seen as symbols of the devil and witchcraft, were said to have been thrown from the Cloth Hall, and since 1955 the Kattenstoet, the Cat Parade, has been held on the second Sunday of May, usually every three years: participants dress as cats, witches and townsfolk of the past, and a jester throws plush toy cats from the belfry to the crowd. The belfry's carillon has 49 bells.

Ypres has adopted peace as a civic theme: it hosts the international campaign secretariat of Mayors for Peace, which works to abolish nuclear weapons. Its other calendar fixtures are noisier — the Ieperfest hardcore metal festival each August, and a rally held in the area since 1965.

About 34,900 people live in the municipality, which takes in the town and ten surrounding villages, among them Boezinge, Dikkebus, Vlamertinge, Zillebeke and Zuidschote. Dutch is the official language and Ieper the official name; the French Ypres is the one English speakers know. The rebuilt market square looks medieval, but the rest of the rebuilt town is more modern in appearance.

Visitors to the battlefields are a constant presence. The Cloth Hall museum, the cafés of the Grote Markt and the shops of chocolate and beer depend on them, and every evening the crowd at the Menin Gate swells or thins with the season. The landscape around the town is still full of the war: bomb craters filled with water, trenches and cemeteries sit among the farmland, and Commonwealth and German war graves cover the countryside.

The rhythm is that of a small Flemish provincial town. Trains run hourly to Kortrijk, the nearest larger city and rail junction, and the countryside is criss-crossed by walking and cycling routes. Bellewaerde, a theme park founded in 1954 on the edge of the municipality, draws around 850,000 to 900,000 visitors a year.

Ypres eats as West Flanders and the rest of Belgium do. Carbonade flamande, known in Dutch as stoofvlees or stoverij, is a beef stew made with Belgian beer instead of the red wine of a French bourguignon, and it counts as one of the national dishes alongside moules-frites, mussels steamed with onions and celery and served with fries. Waterzooi, a rich stew of chicken or fish with vegetables, cream and eggs, comes from Ghent but is found across Flanders, as is steak with fries.

Fries themselves are bought at a frituur, served in a paper cone called a puntzak with the sauce on top; carbonade gravy is one of the warm sauces some offer. The restaurants and pubs around the Grote Markt put out terrace tables in summer, and the shops of the centre sell Belgian chocolates and beer, the town's most common souvenirs.

Beer has local roots. Neighbouring Poperinge grows about 80 per cent of Belgium's hops, has a national hop museum, and holds a hop festival and parade every three years in September; its own brew is called Hommel, the West Flemish word for hops.