Martyrs' Square

The political center of Belgium, with offices of the Flemish government, including the cabinet of the prime minister. It's one of the architectural highlights in Brussels, erected in a uniform neoclassical style between 1774 and 1778 by architect Claude Fisco. It was originally named the St. Michael square after the patron of the city, but the French occupiers didn't like places named after saints and renamed it the Bleachery square for the textile bleaching fields that used to be here. During the Belgian Revolution in 1830, intense guerrilla combat took place on and around the square between the Dutch royal forces and the revolutionaries. There were reportedly so many casualties on the revolutionary side that evacuation of the corpses from the city was not practical, thus it was decided to bury them under the square. The Belgian interim government decided to make the square a national cemetery for the casualties of the revolution. A statue and crypt were constructed shortly afterwards, in 1838, and over 400 revolutionaries are buried beneath the cobblestones of the square, many not far from where they were shot amid the Brussels streets and barricades. The Pro Patria statue is a sculpture from the royal sculpture of the first Belgian king Leopold I, Willem Geefs. After the statue and crypt were completed, the name of the square was changed to Martyrs' Square, a name it still holds.

Source: Wikivoyage, „Brussels/Pentagon“ · authors per page history · CC BY-SA 4.0 · as of 6/15/2018