Every Friday morning, around a pump with a statue of Saint Catherine, Antwerp sells off other people’s furniture. The public stands behind a rope, an auctioneer calls the prices, and a bailiff records each sale in a ledger. The lots are household goods from bankruptcies and estates: office furniture from firms that went under, ornaments someone once loved, sealed boxes of whatever was left. The Vrijdagmarkt, the Friday market, has hosted the second-hand trade since 1549, and the auction still runs from about 9:00 to 13:00.

The writer Derek Blyth, who picked the square as one of his hidden secrets of Belgium for The Brussels Times, described the auctioneer in a heavy anorak and the bailiff in a tent beside a heater. A buyer, he wrote, might leave with a crystal vase worth about ten times its price, or with a sealed box holding four old cardigans and a broken computer. That is the risk, and the attraction.

A square built for old clothes

The square was a property development. In the 15th century the ground belonged to the knight Reinier van der Elst and was known as the Reyniershof; in the 16th it was the Hof van Spangen, after the Van Spangen family. In 1547 the developer Gilbert van Schoonbeke bought it, together with a house called den Conynsberch on the Kammenstraat and part of the courtyard of an inn, den Rooden Leeuw. He cut four streets through the land, the Bergstraat, Leeuwenstraat, Valkstraat and Heilig Geeststraat, and laid out a large square with two exits towards the Steenhouwersvest. In 1549 the market for second-hand clothes and furniture moved here from the Grote Markt, in front of the town hall.

The oldest name for the square was the Oude Kleerkopersmerct, the old-clothes dealers’ market. From 1585 it was the Vrijdachsmerct, the Friday market, and the sale of houses and land was later added to the furniture. The pump in the middle explains the saint: Catherine was the patron of the old-clothes dealers. Its plinth dates from the 18th century and its first statue was by Jean Baptiste Mareels. A V-bomb in 1945 damaged the plinth and destroyed the statue; the one that fell on 2 January 1945 destroyed almost every building on the square except part of the Plantin-Moretus house. The sculptor Mariëtte Coppens carved a new Catherine in 1961 and 1962, and the upper part of the plinth was rebuilt in 1962. The wrought-iron railing round it is from 1900, and the pump has been a protected monument since 8 March 1940.

The houses around it are therefore younger than they look. The square was rebuilt in 1949 in what the heritage inventory calls a rustic style: three storeys of soft red or brown brick under slate roofs, dormers, stone window frames and shopfronts on the ground floor, with gabled fronts at numbers 14, 17 and 18. On the corner of the Leeuwenstraat stands a white stone Virgin by Alfons De Roeck, put up the same year, with a lamp on an iron arm.

The printer’s house

The square’s best-known resident arrived in 1576, when Christophe Plantin moved his family and his presses into a house on the Vrijdagmarkt. His descendants, the Moretus family, printed there for three centuries, and in 1876 Edward Moretus sold the whole business, house, presses, type and archive, to the city. It opened as a museum a year later and became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005. The Museum Plantin-Moretus at Vrijdagmarkt 22 is marking 150 years as a museum and 450 years of printing at the address, and it is doing so behind closed doors: it shut on 3 August 2026 for a renovation and reopens on the weekend of 5 and 6 December.

Ghent has a Vrijdagmarkt too, and the comparison is instructive. Ghent’s has a statue of Jacob van Artevelde in the middle and the socialist trade unions’ building on one side, with Karl Marx‘s “Workers of all countries, unite!” written across the façade in Dutch. Antwerp’s has a patron saint of second-hand dealers and a printing house. One square is about politics; the other is about trade.

What lay underneath

In 2022 the city’s planners set out what the square should become: a calm, sunny market square with terraces against the façades and on the square, not a place for events. About eight parking spaces were to make way for terraces, the streets around it were to become a shared zone at 20 kilometres an hour, and on Friday mornings cars are kept out, except for local traffic, for the market. The twelve old trees were judged unable to grow much further. The district chose twelve American tulip trees, Liriodendron tulipifera, which it expects to live 120 years, each with about 80 cubic metres of soil and at least seven metres from the façades. To keep the colour of the paving, the old mosaic cobbles are to be cleaned and relaid, topped up with stones from the Gierstraat, the Leeuwenstraat and the Bergstraat.

Room for the roots meant digging up the square, and in November 2024 the diggers uncovered two underground bunkers. They were built in the 1950s as fallout shelters, with walls of reinforced concrete about 60 centimetres thick and room for dozens of people on numbered wooden benches, and their 1950s lamps and wiring were still in place. They were never used and had last been opened in the late 1990s. “We knew they were there,” said Paul Cordy, the district mayor. Bart De Wever, then mayor of Antwerp, said building them had been more a signal that the government was dealing with the threat than a shelter for the population. They were taken apart that winter to make room for the trees.

Below the bunkers was older Antwerp. Archaeologists from the Flemish heritage agency and the city found a small polished stone axe, handmade Iron Age pottery, Roman roof tiles and fragments of millstones, a lead token of the 13th or 14th century stamped with the Antwerp hand, and a 14th-century ring with a Latin inscription asking the Mother of God to remember its wearer. It is in better condition than comparable rings in the British Museum and in Munich, and it may have been a pilgrim’s souvenir.

Replanting was the right call. The planners’ own brief says the square’s job is a weekly market and sunny terraces, and a tree that will shade both for a century serves that job; a shelter nobody ever used does not. The Saint Catherine pump stays where it was, in the centre, and the auction goes on around it.

The square has been selling second-hand goods for 477 years. Its trees are meant to last 120.