Woensdagmarkt & Oosterlingenplein (Wednesday Market & Oosterlingen Square)

Two squares for the price of one, close by each other. In the Wednesday Market you’ll at once notice the statue of Hans Memling, one of the most important of the Flemish primitives. The name of Oosterlingen Square refers to the Hanseatic merchants  (‘oosterlingen’ or ‘Easterners’) who did business and had their base here. The German Hanseatic League was a trading network of some 200 cities. Four of these cities had trading posts: London, Novgorod, Bergen and Bruges, where the most import Hanseatic trading post stood. A remnant of this German ‘nation house’, the building to the right of the Bryghia hotel, still stands as a reminder of the grandeur of those times.