St. Vith

St. Vith is Belgium in German — the principal town of the country's east, where the official language is German, the carnival is Rhenish, and the Eifel hills roll across the border as if it were not there. The town's twentieth century was the border's tragedy: transferred from Germany to Belgium in 1920, it stood in the path of the Ardennes offensive in December 1944, and the Battle of the Bulge erased it — St. Vith was bombed to rubble in the fighting, and only the medieval Büchel tower survived to anchor the rebuilt town around it. The reconstruction is the town: modest, orderly streets that hold their memory in a single stone survivor.

Today St. Vith is the amiable capital of Belgian holiday country — the Hohes Venn moors, the Our valley, cross-border cycling on the old railway lines of the Vennbahn, Europe's longest rail-trail — and of the German-speaking Community's cultural life, centred on the Triangel, the modern culture and congress house whose concerts and theatre serve the East Cantons. The concert record's description fits the scale honestly: chamber concerts, choirs, church music and visiting programmes, sustained by a community that takes its singing societies seriously and its carnival more seriously still. One tower, three languages within earshot, and the quietest corner of Belgium: St. Vith earned its calm the hard way.