Live and let live: That has always been the motto in the university town of Leuven, where the councilors built palaces and the students continue to expand the academic district to this day.
Image: Rob Kieffer
One of the oldest universities in Europe is at home in Leuven. But the beer trade in the Flemish city is even older and owes its recent boom to the party-loving student body.
VFrom the seventy meter high belfry of the university library, the bright, metallic tones waft down through the cobbled streets of Leuven, which is called Louvain in French and lions in German. The melody caresses filigree Flemish turrets, noble and guild houses with facades like lacework, prayer houses with baroque tower hoods. The creator of the sounds is Luc Rombouts, who smashes the wooden sticks of the keyboard with his fists and tramples the pedals with his feet. During the semesters, the carillonist, who teaches at the Royal Carillon School in Mechelen, takes visitors up the tower to a concert.
The ascent is athletic and takes place over three hundred steps. That leaves Rombouts with enough time to tell the fateful story of the university library along the way. After the original library, which was housed in the medieval Cloth Hall, burned down with 300,000 books during the First World War, a new library in Flemish Renaissance style was built elsewhere with funds mainly from American universities. During the Second World War it too was to fall victim to the bombs, only the belfry remained standing. This time nine hundred thousand books were destroyed, and again it was donations from all over the world that made reconstruction possible.