Brussels' Double Burden. The capital of Belgium and the EU bears it gladly.

Photo: Ukrinform

They have their own city, completely unlike the lacy Grand-Place. The European Quarter adjoins the centre of Brussels from the east. From eight to nine in the morning and from five to seven in the evening, streams of cars flow along the parallel canyons of two main thoroughfares cutting through it, along the monotonous walls of office buildings: along Rue de la Loi to the centre, along Rue Belliard to the periphery. They spend more time standing than moving. They slowly circle Schuman Square in the very heart of the EU. The shiny aquarium-like facades of the Berlaymont and Charlemagne, the largest buildings of the European Commission, the EU's executive body, look onto the square named after one of the founding fathers of the new united Europe (the Commission occupies several more buildings nearby, as well as on the outskirts of Brussels).

The pink granite block of the Justus Lipsius palace faces the square. The Council of the EU works in it, and regular summits are held there. A little further away is the European Parliament complex, resembling a snow-white ocean liner. It has swallowed up the tracks and platforms of Luxembourg Station, of whose tiny old-fashioned building only the facade wall remains, like a flat theatrical backdrop. And all of this continues to be built: steel scaffolding multiplies, cranes reach toward the sky, pits gape, and 19th-century buildings with cracked stucco and rusty balcony railings forlornly await their inevitable demise.

After eight in the evening, this city dies out. A few small restaurants on surviving old streets enliven the general desolation. Almost no one lives in this city of offices. People come here to work.

Eurocrats often complain that the locals do not like them. The Belgian press, fed by popular rumor, has said all sorts of things about them. They are blamed for all the ills of the capital: construction sites destroying traditional Brussels, the high cost of housing and hotels, restaurant prices comparable to those in Paris. A table companion over a mug of beer will tell you about their salaries and relocation allowances, about the possibility of not paying taxes and fines, about the countless fleet of cars that makes it impossible to park one's own car in the city. There is some truth in all this. But only some.

Property prices in Brussels have risen sharply over 20 years, but still not as much as in Paris, London, or Rome. Traffic jams? Of course, eurocrats contribute their share. But judging by polls, they use the metro incomparably more often than the natives. For trips between the various EU offices, stations, and the centre, it is more convenient.

Salary? Yes. But no one prevents anyone from leaving their home country and familiar job, passing the competition, and taking a vacant position in one of the institutions of the European Quarter. The giant construction sites, which turned part of Brussels into a jumble of glass and concrete boxes and cold canyons of monotonous streets, indeed took away much of its charm. But not only they.

Since the end of the 17th century, when the artillery of Louis XIV destroyed the historic centre of the city, it has constantly been adding to its architectural portrait with not always successful new touches. In the first half of the 20th century, the entire centre remained for a long time in the state of a big construction site for laying underground tracks between the North and South stations. Even earlier, part of the Brussels district of Marolles was demolished, where the cyclopean Palace of Justice now rises.

Only the lower end of the Marolles is fighting for survival, where people still speak the dying Brussels dialect, a dialect of Dutch. In 1967, pandering to property speculators, the People's Palace, built at the beginning of the century by order of the Belgian Labour Party, was destroyed - the best creation of the classic of Art Nouveau architecture, Victor Horta. At least several dozen other masterpieces by this architect remain in the city. It is not European institutions but Belgian ministries and corporations that moved into the skyscrapers of the Northern Quarter, which has been nicknamed Brussels' Manhattan.

Eurocrats love Brussels. It is convenient. Not big and not small: a million inhabitants and 12-15 km in diameter. It is filled with parks and squares, surrounded by green suburbs where more or less affluent people live. It is easy to get into, and easy to leave. To Amsterdam or Luxembourg, after all, is just a two-hour drive; to London's Waterloo station via the Channel Tunnel by high-speed train is a little over two hours; and to Paris's Gare du Nord is less than an hour and a half. Other European capitals are not so far away as not to tempt one to go home for the weekend. Brightly lit motorways escort you to the Belgian borders all night. The airport is 20 minutes from the centre, whether by car or by train. Remember at least one wasted day meeting or seeing off a guest, say, in Moscow.

The balance of relations between eurocrats and Brusselsites turns out quite satisfactory. Some mutual reproaches, but no conflicts. Visitors to the European capital feel great here and dream of staying. Owners of local cafes and restaurants adore foreigners who are ready to swallow anything during a short lunch break, not particularly counting the euros. Brusselsites do not want to lose the manna from heaven in the form of contributions from the EU budget and spending by wealthy guests (the presence of European institutions gives 15% of the city treasury's income). And everyone is secretly proud that their city is first among the capitals of 15, and soon 25 and even 27 EU states. They will gladly accept officials from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta who have already found houses and apartments.

The honor of being a European capital has another downside. Although Brussels hosts the world's largest corps of foreign journalists, this army of knights of the lens and the computer, preoccupied with EU and NATO affairs, has no time to pay attention to its beauties or follow its social and cultural life. Yet the city has its own charm, and its architecture is rich in details not always visible to the superficial eye.

In recent years, the city fathers have spared no effort to enliven its unjustly primitive image. Their main goal is to dispel the entrenched stereotype of Brussels as a bureaucratic capital. Or, in the words of the long-serving mayor, now head of the capital region's government, Xavier de Donnéa, the image of a cold fish. At the end of last year, the regional leadership, together with urban planners, proposed a project for the European Cultural Center on the site of a wasteland occupied by a parking lot between the EU Council and the European Parliament. It is conceived as a leaven for transforming the European Quarter. A complex of museums, exhibition and concert halls, shopping centers, restaurants and residential areas is intended to breathe life into the dead city of officials and lobbyists, bringing back its population, daily life and culture. The project is linked to long-term plans for creating pedestrian zones between European institutions, building residential neighborhoods and educational institutions.

Brussels is the capital not only of Europe, but also of Belgium, and indeed of the Brussels Capital Region, which is part of the Belgian federal state along with French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders. At the same time, it is the formal capital of Flanders, although only 20% of its inhabitants consider Dutch their main language of communication (we won't discuss native language here - that is quite complicated): 80% of Brussels residents are Francophones. At some point in history, the city's commoners forgot their native language and began to speak the language of the nobility and bourgeoisie - French.

The Brussels region is an island within Flanders, and it is separated from Waterloo - the northernmost settlement of Wallonia - by almost ten kilometers of Flemish Brabant. The toponymy indicates that the city originally belonged to Germanic culture. The districts bear the Flemish names of streams that once flowed there ('beek') and long-felled forests ('bos'). Indigenous Brussels residents have Flemish surnames, even if they consider French their mother tongue. The capital region is officially bilingual. Any Belgian official or service worker is required to know both languages. All signs are duplicated in both.

According to Mayor Xavier de Donnéa, the main advantage of Brussels is that it is a crossroads of languages and cultures, not only because of the historical intertwining of Germanic and Latin traditions. Recent history has made it even more a cosmopolitan city, whose appearance is shaped by representatives of more than a hundred nationalities. In the narrow streets of Ilot Sacré - the central medieval part of Brussels, which recalls the prototypes of the rebel Till Eulenspiegel and the glutton Lamme Goedzak - today one can smell Italian pizza, Spanish paella, Moroccan couscous and Turkish döner kebab.

On the streets of the city you not only hear all the languages of Europe, but you can address the first person you meet in English or German, and easily find someone speaking Italian or Spanish. This is a distinction from Paris or London, where knowing foreign languages is not considered obligatory.

There is another language that persistently wins a place in the European capital. Above the cobblestones of the Royal Square, beneath which are preserved the casemates of the palace "Magna Aula", where the knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece held their meetings and Charles V renounced the imperial crown, rises a bronze horseman with a spear and banner. It is said that after the establishment of the Belgian state in 1831, the founding fathers delved into a search for a historical figure who would symbolize the heroic past. But since such a country had not existed in the past, all the famous personalities had, as one would say today, foreign citizenship. They found a neutral ruler of a tiny appanage duchy on the southernmost edge of present-day Belgium - Godfrey of Bouillon. He was famous for selling his impregnable fortress and lands, and with the proceeds, with the blessing of Pope Urban, organized the First Crusade to the Holy Land. After bloodily suppressing the resistance of the then quite tolerant Muslims, he became the Christian king of Jerusalem. The descendants of the crusaders were absorbed into the population of Palestine, while people from the Arab East came to Brussels centuries later.

Immigrants also found a place

The center, whose housing stock has, to put it mildly, deteriorated, is populated by immigrants of the first waves - Italians, Spaniards and Greeks - and the adjacent, even less well-maintained quarters by later candidates for Belgian citizenship - Moroccans and Turks. They came to Belgium at different times through organized labor recruitment for coal mines. But the mines long ago closed, and the immigrants took up other pursuits. Their children became Belgian citizens while retaining the language and traditions of their historical homeland. Following the organized labor, a trickle of unorganized and even illegal immigration has flowed. Demographers at the University of Louvain calculated that by the beginning of the 21st century, the population of Brussels was 38% non-Belgian. Compared to Amsterdam, Frankfurt or London, immigrants in Brussels live more compactly, in specific districts. These are relatively poor areas to the north, south and west of the historical center, near the industrial zones along the navigable canal that cuts through the western half of Brussels. The unemployment rate there exceeds 40%, and the main income is social welfare paid for by Belgian taxpayers.

The history of the commune (district) of Anderlecht is telling; its name is known primarily to football fans. It was once populated by Flemings. One of its distinguished citizens was Professor Erasmus, who later received the nickname of Rotterdam. There is his house-museum. As Jews were expelled from Catholic Spain, they moved to the tolerant outskirts of the empire, and Anderlecht became one of the centers of attraction. During the Nazi occupation, the Jewish population was almost completely deported and destroyed, as evidenced by a memorial amphitheater of black marble with the names of the residents who did not return. After the war, immigrants, primarily Moroccans, flocked here. A kind of ghetto arose. Today in Anderlecht, under the arches of the former cattle market, surrounded by immigrant quarters, the largest market in the country buzzes on weekends - a truly Arabic one.

Buildings along the canal recall the industrial past of Brussels. Some enterprises still operate at their old addresses, for example the brewery "Belle-Vue". Others have been adapted for import-export automobile firms that sell used cars to poor countries. In the brick buildings of the port warehouses "Tour & Taxis", the largest discotheque thunders at night. But there are also many empty, abandoned buildings, the former grandeur of whose owners is now recalled only by barely visible inscriptions on the walls. Industry has "fled" from the city, which has changed its profile. A little remains of the food, electronics industries... Only the chimneys of the thermal power station on the southwestern outskirts smoke. Brussels residents, if they work, do so mainly in the service sector or as civil servants. One of the surprising exceptions is the modern buildings of the Volkswagen automobile plant in the commune of Forest.

Wealthy Brussels residents have moved to the eastern and southern outskirts of the city, surrounding themselves with comfort, while tens of thousands of those working in the capital simply live 30-60 km away from it. It is they, called "shuttles" here, who create traffic jams on the roads in the mornings and evenings.

Not differing in this respect from his subjects, King of the Belgians Albert II also comes to work every morning at the official palace in the city center, and in the afternoon returns to the Laeken residence, on the northern outskirts, among the green expanse of the royal domain.

Nearby are the King Baudouin central stadium and an entertainment complex with a water park, restaurants, and Kinepolis with 25 movie theaters - a product of the dubious idea to gather the entire film distribution under one roof. The most informative part of the complex is "Mini-Europe", an open-air museum. Walking through it, you can see the entire old continent, or rather, reduced copies of its most famous buildings and structures: from Westminster Abbey to the Parthenon.

The Pentagon can also be found here

The central part of Brussels is bounded by a transport ring, built in place of the last city wall and nicknamed the Pentagon for its pentagonal shape. The eastern and western halves are at different elevations. The Upper Town is power. Here are the royal palace, both chambers of parliament, the prime minister's residence, and a whole range of ministries, including the Foreign Ministry with the Egmont Palace, and the Palace of Justice. This is how it happened historically. In the Middle Ages, on Coudenberg Hill stood the palace of the Dukes of Brabant. The feudal lords looked down from on high at the cramped labyrinth of the city of artisans and merchants, free citizens, nestled by the river Zenne (now flowing in an underground pipe). Between them, as if in the middle, on the slope is the Cathedral of St. Gudula: ideological power.

Such a territorial separation of powers is characteristic of Flanders, where rich free cities grew up already in the Middle Ages. On the Grand-Place itself, which is not without reason called the most beautiful square in Europe, there is neither a cathedral nor a palace. On it, facing each other, two Gothic buildings dominate with their elegance and splendor: the Town Hall and the King's House. If the former was originally and remains the house of the city council, then in the latter, despite its name, no king ever lived. The building appeared as a bread market, similar to other markets that had gathered around the Grand-Place at the time and are recalled by the names of streets and squares of the Old Town. The richest corporations of merchants and artisans bought the right to build their headquarters on the Grand-Place, competing in architectural extravagance and originality. The narrow, lavishly Baroque facades of the former guild and craft houses form a unique ensemble of the square. Now they house restaurants and beer halls, which in warm weather place tables right on the cobblestone pavement.

In house 26, where the tavern "The Golden Barge" is located, Victor Hugo lived in exile, as evidenced by a memorial plaque. Brussels has long been famous for its democratic traditions and serves as a refuge for many political exiles. Opposite "The Golden Barge" (at the address Grand-Place, 9) is the restaurant "The Swan House" - named after the sculpture above the entrance. It also has a memorial plaque. The site of the chic restaurant was once occupied by a people's beer hall, in which the founding congress of the Belgian Workers' Party was held. In the same beer hall, which also served as a discussion club, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the beginning of 1848 first read their "Manifesto of the Communist Party"...

In the colonnade of "The Swan House", a figure of a reclining man gleams in polished bronze. Tourists, who move in crowds from the Grand-Place toward the "Peeing Boy", will certainly stroke it. They have worn it down to holes. According to a legend invented by guides, this is supposed to bring happiness. And not everyone is interested in the fact that this is a monument to Everard t'Serclaes - a citizen and patriot of Brussels, who in 1356 expelled the troops of the Count of Flanders from the free city, and 32 years later was killed by the men of Count Gaasbeek.

In the "Peeing Boy" (more precisely, the little peeing boy, in the Brussels dialect - "manneken pis"), what attracts more is the funny legend about a child who allegedly saved his native city from fire. Little Julien, who is usually seen naked, can certainly be considered the best-dressed child in the world.

The 60-cm-tall statuette, which has become an unofficial symbol of Brussels, was cast in 1619 by the sculptor Duquesnoy to adorn one of the city's fountains - a fashionable attribute of architecture and daily life at the time. And in 1698, Maximilian Emanuel, the ruler of Bavaria and Flanders visiting Brabant, presented the little boy with his first costume on the occasion of the crossbowmen's festival, thereby starting the tradition of dressing him. Since then, every self-respecting and sufficiently high-ranking delegation that comes to Brussels, knowing this custom, brings the boy a costume as a gift: sometimes national, sometimes with some significance. After 1945, the wardrobe grows on average by 15-20 costumes a year. A special commission decides whether the donor is worthy of presenting a costume to the bronze idol of Brussels. "We are not chasing records," Guy Loiseau, president of the Friends of the Manneken Pis Society, told me with pointed dignity. Any advertising or political themes are excluded. The Brussels urchin has dressed up as all sorts of things: a firefighter and a Scottish guardsman, a Chinese mandarin and a urologist, a Resistance fighter and a carnival gille, a medieval knight and Mickey Mouse, an FBI agent and a shrimp catcher, Santa Claus and a cosmonaut... The entire wardrobe can be seen in the museum in the King's House. The statuette tourists take photos of is actually a copy. It was made in 1963 to replace the one that had been stolen. Before that, the statuette had been stolen three times. The first thieves were soldiers of the French king Louis XV. He was so ashamed of his subordinates that he gave the copy an outfit embroidered with pure gold.

There is no nightlife, but there is an evening one

In this city, it is more appropriate to speak of evening than nightlife. After midnight it falls asleep, even on weekends. This is not like Paris, Rome or Amsterdam, where even at four in the morning there are traffic jams in the streets. At night in Brussels, only a few establishments remain open, mostly dance clubs where young people have fun. A couple of streets near the North Station with sex shops and girls in purple windows seem like a modest imitation of Amsterdam's red-light district, and the establishments listed in guides as cabarets have nothing in common with the Parisian "Lido" and "Moulin Rouge". And the opera La Monnaie, famous in the 19th century, does not compete with the Grand Opera or Covent Garden. But when it comes to eating well and drinking plenty, especially beer, Brussels has no equal.

Visitors, after wandering around the Grand Place and tired of the motley shops selling Brabant lace and tapestries, settle at tables in the labyrinth of narrow medieval streets of the Ilot Sacré quarter. The main one is Rue de Bouchers, which literally means "butchers' street", but among tourists it is better known as "fish street", obviously because of the seafood displayed and listed on the menus of establishments run by Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and Arabs. There are also menus in Russian. But among the locals, in this kingdom of public catering aimed at tourists, only three or four places have a good reputation. They do not go into the others: too expensive and not very tasty.

Having eaten fish, lobsters, and oysters on the colorful "butchers' street", the uninitiated are unlikely to notice the narrow openings leading, as it were, into the depths of courtyards. Meanwhile, it is in such hidden corners, very close to the Grand Place, that the traditional taverns "Toone", "Becasse", "Image de Nostradamus", and "Vieux Temps" are tucked away. The sweet-and-sour beer "Lambic", prepared according to old recipes of spontaneous fermentation and resembling a weak brew, served at "Becasse", is not appreciated by everyone at first, and the clay jugs often remain undrunk. But it is here that you can feel the atmosphere of a Brussels beer hall of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After all, Brussels' golden age was the era of silent cinema and Art Nouveau. Few establishments have preserved their decor from that time. Among them are "Mort Subite" ("Sudden Death" - named after a card game) near the central station, and "Chez Richard" on the Sablon. And there are also many beer bars offering countless varieties of the main Belgian drink. The menu of the "Moeder Lambic" beer bar in the Saint-Gilles district, which is open all night, lists more than a thousand types of beer. According to the owner, all the beer of Belgium.