Gouda

Gouda is a common noun in every supermarket on earth, and a proper town of uncommon treasures. The cheese — traded here since the Middle Ages, weighed at the porticoed Waag, celebrated each summer Thursday when farmers in costume slap hands over wheels on the market square before the flamboyant Gothic town hall — made the name global; the stroopwafel, invented by Gouda's bakers from leftovers and syrup, conquered the coffee break; and the town's candles light the most Dutch of ceremonies, Kaarsjesavond, when the electric lights die and thousands of flames fill the square's windows for Christmas.

The astonishment is inside Sint-Janskerk, the longest church in the Netherlands: the Gouda Windows, seventy-two monumental stained-glass works of the sixteenth century, survived Reformation and war intact — the finest ensemble of its age anywhere, given by kings, bishops and city councils, a national treasure in a cheese town's nave. Erasmus, the town notes mildly, went to school here. The concert record's register — churches, choirs, cultural centres, visiting ensembles — fits Gouda's scale, with the great church's acoustics as the natural stage of honour. A cheese, a waffle, a wall of glass: Gouda's exports range from the everyday to the irreplaceable, and the town weighs them all with the same scales.