The Fire in St John’s Tower

It was around ten o’clock in the evening on 2 September 1602 when the first flames became visible. High above the rooftops of Ghent, where the wooden spire of St John’s Church pointed like a finger to the sky, a glow appeared — faint at first, as though someone had lit a candle behind the shutters of the bell chamber, but soon fiercer, wilder, untameable.

The bells began to ring, not by human hands but by the heat that warped the timber and tightened the ropes. It was a sound no one ever wanted to hear: the sound of a tower dying. Within an hour the entire spire was alight, and the flames stood out against the night sky like a second sunrise, bloody and ominous.

The people of Ghent watched and searched for an explanation. Lightning it had not been — the sky was clear. An accident, then? The people of the seventeenth century did not believe in accidents, not when something as sacred as a church tower was concerned. This was the work of the devil, they whispered. Or worse: of witches.

The rumours spread faster than the fire itself. Two women from the city were named, arrested and questioned — questioned in the manner of those times, with ropes and weights and questions to which only one answer was possible. Under the pain they confessed to everything their interrogators wished to hear. Yes, they had caused the fire. Yes, the devil had helped them. Yes, they were guilty.

In 1603 the two women were executed. The city had found its culprits, and the conscience of Ghent could rest again. That the confessions were worthless — extracted by torture, without proof, without witnesses — mattered to no one. The tower had burned, and someone had to pay for it.

The flames died, the rubble was cleared, and Ghent looked up at what remained: a blunt tower, flattened like a broken tooth, without the graceful spire that had soared above the city for centuries. There was talk of rebuilding, plans were drawn, but the money was not there and neither was the will. The spire was never rebuilt.

And so the tower still stands — today’s St Bavo’s Cathedral, famous for the Ghent Altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers, but with a silhouette that will forever bear the scar of that September night in 1602. The four stone pinnacles at its corners are all that remain of what was once a tall, proud spire.

Of the two women who died for a crime they did not commit, no one remembers the names. The tower does not remember them either. It simply stands there, blunt and silent, gazing out over a city that once watched it burn and let two innocents die because it needed an explanation for something that had none.