Dit is Raaf

In the year of our Lord 1251, immediately after Easter [Apr 16], those of Fivelgo and Hunzingo gave each other hostages and renewed their alliance; and with the help of those of Menterne[1] they laid siege to Groningen. Some crossed the ramparts, and climbed on ladders and started to fight them manfully. The Groningers defended themselves for a long time with stones and trebuchets, expecting that the Frisians would, according to their customs, soon return to their own region. But when the Frisians had maintained their siege for four weeks, the Groningers began to fear that, when the city would be taken by force, an enormous carnage would take place. Therefore they surrendered themselves in the hands of the enemy. The Frisians set the condition that the walls would be destroyed, and that the stonehouses would be pulled down till the storage rooms; the traders were allowed to keep living there with their possessions, but the knights would have to leave the city with their life and property, and would never be allowed again to have a residence there. And so the the walls were leveled for the largest part and the houses were lowered. The knights resided that year on the other side of Coevorden[2], where it was possible. Also the fortification of Peize was destroyed.

[1] Menterne: Frisian shire East of Fivelgo.
[2] Castle guarding the Southern moor pass of Drenthe
[3] Peize: village to the SW of Grongingen, where the Van Groningen clan had a castle.

Eerste artikel met nieuw CMS programma gemaakt, op een gehoste server van NetGround, gebouwd in PHP

In 1974 heb ik met Erik de Vries en Jan Bos bij VERA een zeefdrukkerij opgezet om posters voor concerten te maken.

Bovenstaande poster is de eerste die we toen gemaakt hebben, met uitgesneden letters van papier.

De afbeelding vond ik op het Pop Archief Groningen.

Kaart voor Google Earth

De gegevens komen uit "De Wolden en het water", W.A. Ligtendag, Groningen 1995.

In deze lijsten van het klooster Werden uit de 9e eeuw en later worden een groot aantal plaatsnamen uit dit gebied voor het eerst vermeld.

Zij behoren tot de oudste bronnen over dit gebied.

Bij het openen van de kaart in Google Earth kunnen de gegevens over de plaatsen bekeken worden. De oude en de overeenkomstige moderne namen zijn vermeld. Ook zijn de plaatsen uit de lijsten vermeld die niet gelokaliseerd konden worden.

Het is handig om de overlay Groningen-800nc half doorzichtig te maken, zodat de moderne topografie van Google Earth er doorheen te zien is.

De overlay komt van de Paleogeografische kaarten uit de Atlas van Nederland in het Holoceen (2011), situatie 800 AD.

Een eigen gebouw voor de arbeidersbeweging

This afternoon I walked through the city and my eye was caught by a building I had never noticed before. When I searched it on the web, it proved to have an interesting history. It was the building of the first cooperation in the Netherlands (where the idea started a bit later than in the UK).

The building is called 'De Toekomst' (the Future), and it was built in 1887, primarily to provide a meeting place for worker organisations, that had a hard time renting meeting places with commercial landlords.

It also housed a cooperative bakery, and two homes.

The cooperation was organised by the head of public works of the city of Groningen, Joan Nieuwenhuis. A year earlier he had started a socialist newspaper and wanted to resign from the city, but the (conservative) mayor convinced him to stay on.

His newspaper was financed by a rich farmer, Derk Roelof Mansholt, grandfather of Sicco Mansholt, who would become one of the founding fathers of the European Economic Communion, and architect of the (infamous?) common European agricultural policy.

For the cooperation the collateral was interestingly provided by the biggest factory owner and grand entrepreneur Jan Evert Scholten, and the nobleman Jhr.Mr. W.C.A. Alberda van Ekenstein, Dutch parliamentarian.

So although relations between workers and employers could be harsh in 19th century Groningen, there was also a genuine recognition and even assistence by those employers of the worker organisations.

An interesting thing I learned at the Day of the Archeology in April 2013 was the way our local geography was formed.

The yellow-red piece of highground in this elevation map is essentially the province of Drenthe, with the City of Groningen at the Northern tip.

The most obvious features here are the parallel ridges running from SSE to NNW on the East side of the plateau. The Easternmost being called the 'Hondsrug'.

But on the West side of the plateau a much finer grid of ridges running SSW to NNE can be recognised.
These latter ridges were formed during the Salien (238.000 - 128.000 BP) when an ice sheet scraped towards the SSW.

At the end of that ice age an enormous melting lake formed in the area of Münster in the Westphalian Lowland.

This made the ice sheet flow very fast (for an ice sheet) towards the SSE, carving the major structure into the earth. At that time there were parallel ridges for 100 km towards the East, but then the lake near Münster broke through towards the North Sea area in a giant flush, washing away anything in its path East of the last ridge on this map.

The Westphalian Lowland is surrounded by low mountain ranges in the South and East, and by the ice sheet on the West and North, so a tremendous amount of water could be locked up there.

Thus the bed of the river Ems would be formed for the future.

Directly to the East of the 'Hondsrug' ridge, a 80 metres deep valley was formed, that would become sea in the upcoming warm period, and would be filled with sand by the wind during the last ice age, when the ice didn't reach all the way here.

In 1898 the first Dutch vehicle license was issued to the Groninger W.A. van Dam.



Two ladies drive the car in the village of Zoutkamp.

The car was made by the "Groninger Motorrijtuigen Fabriek" (Groninger Motorcarriage Factory) of brother Johannes van Dam, who registered the second Dutch car for himself:



The cars were produced with a German Lutzman patent, and when that patent was acquired by sewing machine factory Opel, Van Dam changed to a patent by Bentz.

Here is a video of an Opel Lutzman car driving: