Enkhuizen – Apr 2025
Zuiderzee Museum
Enkhuizen is a historic harbor town in the province of North Holland, Netherlands. Once an important fishing and trading port on the Zuiderzee, it has a rich maritime heritage. After the construction of the Afsluitdijk in 1932, which turned the Zuiderzee into the freshwater IJsselmeer, Enkhuizen became a key site for preserving the culture of the region.
The town is home to the Zuiderzee Museum, founded in 1948 to safeguard the history, buildings, and traditions of the communities that once surrounded the Zuiderzee. The museum features an indoor collection and a large open-air section with relocated and reconstructed buildings from 24 different towns and villages.
Today, Enkhuizen is a picturesque tourist destination, known for its canals, historical architecture, and strong connection to Dutch maritime life.
TL;DR
Revisiting Enkhuizen after 8 years
First visited in Sep 2012 with amma appa, then with Anusha in May 2014, then with Aravind & family in Apr 2017. Now as a birthday outing, we spent the day wandering around the Zuiderzee outdoor museum showcasing Holland from a 100 years ago.
Layers of nostalgia
For the people of the region, the Zuiderzee Museum at Enkhuizen represents nostalgia of the past era. For me, it is nostalgia of “discovering” a hidden destination in the Netherlands some 13 years ago. Back then, I didn’t notice any foreign tourists – it seemed to be mostly Dutch people visiting (except for my parents and me!), and I have the impression of grand parents taking their little grand children for a day out here. But today, it was full of German tourists (a bus load!), and a visiting school class.
On my earlier visits, I had only understood the purpose of the Zuiderzee Museum very superficially – that it preserves the way of life of a 100 years ago Holland in general. This time, I clearly understood its real purpose: to preserve and showcase the history and culture of the cities around the erstwhile Zuiderzee, which in 1932, got cut off from the North Sea due to the building of the Afsluitdijk. This enclosed body of water has become a fresh water “lake”, the Ijsselmeer.
This is one more example of the mastery of the Dutch over water: a hundred years ago, the Zuiderzee region was prone to violent storms blowing in from the North Sea. They decided to build the Afsluitdijk, to make life easier in the region, with the consequence that the nature of the water, and hence everything around it, would change. The Dutch, being known for their practical nature, accepted this consequence. To offset it a little, they also put in a lot of thought, time, and effort into recreating the old way of life so as to honor and remember. Enkhuizen was chosen as the location for this showcase.
Getting there by train was part of my nostalgia, though it is twice as fast to go by car.
Some impressions of the outdoor museum: all about boats, fish, and nets.
Other aspects of life back then: the reconstructed buildings, the windmill for pumping water, the central laundry powered by coal.
Some glimpses of the indoor museum below:
