The story goes like this. A giant, Druon Antigoon, controlled the Scheldt and charged a toll; anyone who would not pay had a hand cut off and thrown into the river. A young Roman soldier, Silvius Brabo, challenged him, cut off the giant’s own hand and threw that into the river instead. Hand werpen, throwing hands, became Antwerpen. It is a neat explanation of a city’s name, and it is unlikely to be true.

The legend

The tale comes in two versions. In one, Antigoon guarded a bridge over the Scheldt and taxed whoever crossed it; in the other, he watched the port and charged passing ships. Either way the punishment was the same, and so was the ending. Brabo, in the legend, is not only the city’s founder and namesake but also Duke of Brabant, which ties the story to the duchy as well as the town. The historical record is more modest. Godfrey of Bouillon was Margrave of Antwerp from 1076 to 1100, and the Duchy of Brabant went to Henry I in 1183, with no giant involved.

Antwerp has another giant, too. At the entrance bridge to Het Steen, the medieval fortress in the old centre whose surviving gateway dates from between 1200 and 1225, a statue shows the Lange Wapper, a giant said to have terrorised the people of medieval Antwerp. Above its entrance arch is a bas-relief of Semini, a fertility figure, and the building took its present name around 1520, after Charles V had it rebuilt. Het Steen was a prison from 1303 to 1827, housed the city’s archaeology museum from 1890 and a maritime annex from 1952, and reopened as a visitor centre, with a concrete extension, in October 2021.

What the name means

The written record points elsewhere. Roman coins carry the form Ando Verpia; a Germanic Andhunerbo appears around 567, and the Life of St Eligius, written by Dado, has Andoverpis. Antverpia is the Neo-Latin version that later scholars used. If the name is Frankish or Frisian, it may combine anda, meaning against, with a noun from the verb werpen, to throw, which could describe a deposit on a riverbank, a defensive mound or a wharf: something thrown up against the water. If Andoverpis is Celtic, it could mean those who live on both banks. Neither reading involves a giant.

An earlier version of this guide added that Brabo was a nephew of Julius Caesar. No source we could find says so, and the legend does not need the help.

The fountain

The legend got its monument in the 19th century. The Brabo Fountain stands on the Grote Markt, in front of the City Hall that Cornelis Floris de Vriendt and others built between 1561 and 1565, in a Renaissance style with Flemish and Italian influences, after an earlier plan by Domien de Waghemakere. The hall burned to a shell in the Spanish Fury of 1576 and was restored three years later. The fountain was paid for from the bequest of August Nottebohm and made by the sculptor Jef Lambeaux, and it was inaugurated on 21 August 1887.

It is 10.6 metres high, in stone and bronze. The sculpture and its cylindrical pedestal sit on a base of stacked rough rocks, which replaced the original water basin in 1886, and three mermaids leaning against each other form the middle group. The fountain has been a protected monument since 27 October 1982.

Hands everywhere

The hand also sells. In 1934 the Royal Association of Master Pastry Chefs of Antwerp held a competition, and Jos Hakker, a Jewish pastry chef from Amsterdam, won it with a buttery biscuit in the shape of a hand, made with eggs, sugar, flour, butter and flaked almonds. The chocolatier Goossens later made the hands in chocolate, at first without filling; since 1982 they have also come with marzipan, praline or Elixir d’Anvers inside.

The best thing the legend produced is the biscuit, not the fountain. Lambeaux’s bronze asks you to admire a severed hand; Hakker’s version asks you to eat one, which is a more Antwerp response to a gruesome story, and it took an outsider from Amsterdam to think of it.

The city has also lent its setting to bigger stories than its own. Richard Wagner set Lohengrin in Antwerp, on the Scheldt, in the 10th century, with King Henry arriving in Brabant; the opera opened in Weimar on 28 August 1850.

Wagner needed an opera. Antwerp makes do with a biscuit.