Place du Grand Sablon

In nineteen fifty-eight, Brussels antiques dealer Georges Van de Weghe was looking for buyers for his engravings. His shop stood near Place du Grand Sablon, and he asked the parish priest of the Sablon church to let him trade by the church after Sunday Mass. The calculation was practical: parishioners came straight out onto the square and could stop by his goods.

The parish priest suggested inviting other antiques dealers and setting up a shared market. They then had to wait several months for city permission. On April third, nineteen sixty, the traders first set out their stalls here. There were so many buyers and people seeking a spot that by the beginning of the nineteen seventies, the organizers had taken over the neighboring streets as well. The market still operates on Saturdays and Sundays; antiques shops and art galleries subsequently became established around the square.

Van de Weghe chose the Sablon because of the parishioners, but he traded in a place with a long market history. Horses were sold here from thirteen twenty to seventeen fifty-four. In the nineteenth century, dairy sellers and vegetable vendors replaced them. For many centuries, the open space between the church and the houses had allowed people to inspect goods, agree on a price, and take their purchase away immediately.

The market is set up around the Minerva Fountain. Before urban development, sandy marshy meadows lay beyond Brussels's first wall; the word “Sablon” refers to this soil. A marshy hollow remained in the center. Brussels residents filled it in in sixteen fifteen, and a fountain was installed here later.

The present-day Minerva was commissioned by Thomas Bruce, 2nd Earl of Ailesbury and 3rd Earl of Elgin, an English earl. After the overthrow of King James II, he sought the restoration of the House of Stuart to the throne, kept in contact with the exiled king, and ended up in the Tower of London on suspicion of conspiracy. After his release, Bruce left England: new laws threatened him with further prosecution.

In Brussels, he married the local countess Charlotte d'Argenteau, Countess d'Esneux. She owned a large house directly on Place du Grand Sablon. Bruce was not impoverished: his son and younger brother managed his English estates and sent him the income. But the short exile stretched across the rest of his life. Even after receiving permission to return, the earl remained in the city where he already had a house and a family.

In seventeen forty, Bruce ordered that Brussels be given a new fountain in gratitude for its welcome. He died a year later. His heir John Bruce completed the commission: the sculptor Jacques Bergé installed Minerva in seventeen fifty-one. The donor's coats of arms and a dedication naming forty years of Brussels hospitality remain on the pedestal.

For its first three years, Minerva still stood in the middle of the horse market. Now, on weekends, traders lay out engravings, silver, ceramics, books, and small pieces of furniture around its basins—the very market that began with one antiques dealer's request to sell a few prints after Mass.