I
n a secluded hollow in Brussels Park a monument marks the spot where the Russian tsar Peter the Great was drunkenly sick after attending a particularly boozy banquet in April 1717.
The strange memorial is featured in a new travel guide, Bizarre Belgium, gathering together 50 of Belgium’s strangest places — and making a good case for the country to be considered among Europe’s most idiosyncratic.
“Belgium is an eccentric country because of its history and weird situation, with the different languages and peoples. So, I think we try to make it fun and this is why we have a surrealist tradition,” Kamiel De Bruyne, one of the guide’s authors, said.
Belgium is a country regarded by many historians as an artificial creation by Europe’s great powers after the defeat of Napoleon, which often seems to be on the brink of falling apart. It is an uneasy marriage between the Dutch-speaking Flemish and francophone Walloons, governed by a famously dysfunctional state, with various dark chapters in its less than 200-year history.
