The Cathedral of St Bavo in Ghent

On the general calendar, today is the feast of St Remigius, the bishop of Reims who baptized the Frankish king Clovis in 508, a major event for the Christianization of the Franks and the establishment of the French nation. Since he died on January 13, the octave day of the Epiphany, his feast is kept on October 1st, the date of a translation of his relics which took place in 852 A.D. In the Middle Ages, many places kept this feast jointly with various other confessors, one of whom is St Bavo, the patron of the Belgian city of Ghent, where he died ca. 655. (He is also known as Allowin; the Dutch form of his name is Baaf.)

The Conversion of St Bavo, 1624, by Peter Paul Rubens.

Bavo was a nobleman and a soldier, a native of the eastern region of modern Belgium called Hesbaye in French, Haspengouw in Dutch, and Hasbania in Latin; the principality of Liège, formerly a very important ecclesiastical center and state, borders it to the east. He led a very irregular life, but after being left a widower while still young, he was converted by the preaching of a Saint called Amand, and after giving away all his money, entered a monastery. Amand was a great missionary, and Bavo accompanied him on several of his trips in Flanders and northern France, but after a time, his spiritual father let him go to live as a hermit. A well-known story is told that after his conversion, he met a man whom he had sold into serfdom, and did penance for this by having the man publicly lead him in chains to a prison. Eventually, he returned to the monastery at Ghent and ended his life there.

Ghent ca. 1540. The church in the middle is the abbey of St Bavo, which was destroyed by the Emperor Charles V. The tower of the other St Bavo, not yet a cathedral, is the one on the left among the three right behind it. 

Today, his name is certainly best known in reference to the cathedral of Ghent, which is titled to him, since that church is the home of one of the most famous pieces of art ever made, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, (1425 ca. -32) by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, often more simply called the Ghent Altarpiece. The current Gothic structure was begun in 1274, but not completed until 1569; it was originally a secular canonical church, and only made a cathedral when Ghent became a diocese ten years before its completion. Part of the reason why the Ghent Altarpiece is The Ghent Altarpiece is that the church was raided in 1566 by Calvinists, who, acting as they believed, (which is to say, more like Mohammedans than Christians), smashed up many of its artworks. Of the works later commissioned to replace them, perhaps only the Rubens shown above is really noteworthy, and certainly the only one at all to the taste of our own times.

Ghent is a port city, even though it is 23 miles inland, since it sits at the confluence of two rivers. In 2015, a ship coming into the port collided with and killed a young finback whale nearly 40 feet long, which remained stuck on its bow. The body was brought to the University of Ghent for study, and afterwards, the skeleton was hung up in St Bavo within the ambulatory of the choir as a kind of ex voto, and a reminder of the story of the prophet Jonah; it has been given the name Leo.

A broad view of the nave. (It appears that the modern altar seen here has subsequently been replaced with something much nicer, as seen in the next photograph.) 

The high altar within the choir

The ceiling seen at the crossing.

In the 18th century, the Catholic parts of the Low Countries saw a vogue for extremely elaborate Baroque preaching pulpits; this one was created by a Flemish sculptor named Laurent Delvaux in 1741-45.

The side-chapels in the ambulatory are separated from it by very beautiful screens made of white and black marble.