Oude Kerk

Amsterdam's oldest building started as a wooden chapel built by fishermen around 1213, which tells you everything about where this city came from. By 1306, the stone church that replaced it was consecrated by the bishop of Utrecht, dedicated to Saint Nicholas — patron saint of sailors, which made perfect sense for a town that was basically a collection of docks and warehouses at that point.

What makes the Oude Kerk genuinely strange is that you're walking on the dead. The entire floor consists of 2,500 gravestones, beneath which approximately 60,000 Amsterdammers are buried, stacked and layered over centuries. The church was built on a cemetery, and when space ran out, they just kept burying people under the flagstones inside. Rembrandt's wife Saskia van Uylenburgh is here — she was buried in 1642, and you can visit her grave in the Holy Sepulchre chapel. Rembrandt himself was a regular, and all his children were christened in this church.

Look up, because the ceiling is extraordinary. Those Estonian oak planks date to 1390 and form the largest medieval wooden vault in Europe, noted for their remarkable acoustics. Then look around at what's missing: during the Beeldenstorm of 1566, a Protestant mob smashed most of the church's Catholic art and fittings in a frenzy of iconoclastic destruction. After the Reformation in 1578, it became a Calvinist church and has stayed that way ever since.

Today the Oude Kerk sits in the heart of the Red Light District, which creates one of Amsterdam's most surreal contrasts: medieval sanctity surrounded by neon-lit windows. The church embraces the irony and regularly hosts contemporary art exhibitions inside.