Star Fort: Elburg, Nederland

Welcome back, fellow researcher, to another one of the many star islands in Nederland. Elburg is a small fishing village located on the Veluweneer river estuary. This area turns out to have a very interesting past, one that links nicely to the star island we have found there. Elburg is not officially a star or bastian fort, but as you will see it definitely qualifies.

You are not mistaken if you think you have seen this article before, as we published it in our first week. We always had the intention of filling in some of the detail behind this amazing location. Eight months on, we are finally republishing.

For now, our Star Fort articles are deliberately left without information. We will be running a special that will make it all clear.

The original article content from January 2, 2023.

Looking at this depiction of Elburg from the 1500s, we can’t help but notice the similarity to another star island we are researching, which is located over 1300 km away in Italy, the Baldassarre Lanci.

Elburg was once a thriving capital city, much larger than Amsterdam, and is still the municipal of the region of Gelderland. Even more interestingly is that this could be the birthplace of the Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic League was once a powerful merchant people that spanned the realm.

This wonderful image (above) shows a side profile of the island, when it stood proud on the land. Estimating the size of the walls against the cathedral, we could imagine that the whole city would have been raised by up to five meters from the surrounding landscape. And yet today we see it with a moat surrounding the city. Is this more evidence of the MFT?

This image (shown above) from 1392 already shows that this city is no longer elevated from the surrounding landscape, and it is clearly now landlocked and level with the fields around it.

Moving forward in time, the Gemeente Atlas van Nederland published a fantastic illustration in 1868 showing the island and city completed. Which leads us to look more closely at the city and its layout, as an extension of the original star island.

The city has been built in four quarters separated by two roads. Amazingly, the city has been planned using the “golden section”, showing an advanced understanding of geometry in the so called dark or middle ages.

The central city is contained within a golden rectangle which is 370 by 240 meters by using the Fibonacci sequence. The whole city was built as an expression of a double pentagon.

The narrative suggests that when the city was finished, plots were sold with a commitment to build a house within a year, and apparently the city houses were all completed within four years time. The very impressive church on the island was apparently built in two phases: a square building that was dated 1397 (in red, below), and the familiar torrents were apparently added at some point (?) in the 1500s (shown in blue).

But in truth, we feel this is a grand cover up for this immense super structure and its perfect geometry.

This next photo we found interesting. The main church tower is built with brick (the top long gone supposedly to fire), and although we know it would have housed a huge resonance bell, it also looks similarly to a desert cooling tower in the way it is vented.

Getting back to the star island, we can see that it splits the river in two. The official narrative is that the city was built from a settlement that spanned both sides of the river, it has even been suggested that some of the original houses were relocated in the process of constructing Elburg, but as we know from the earlier picture, the fort was originally raised, so we doubt this story. In the next picture, we can get a clearer view of the current city layout.

As we can see, the church does not take centre stage but is in one of the quarters adjacent to a women’s monastery which was active in the 1500s and now acts as a museum. An interesting note regarding the entrance to the city is that it is also built from the principles of the Golden Ratio.

The city is still crossed by a network of water courses that converge at a central point. Some of the original fortified wall still remains, although they have now been largely destroyed, repurposed or removed.

Navigating through this amazing city is helped by some interesting signage. Each street and point of interest is marked by a symbol on the floor — some are obvious and some take a bit more imagination to decipher. This is a wonderfully uniform, and quite unique, feature for a city, making good sense for a merchant city that would be host to many a foreign sailor in need of direction.

It’s only fair at this point to get a popular history view of our Star City, but we may agree by now that our questions are far beyond simple dates and battle stories.

Just before you leave your comments, we have one last curious fact about this wondrous city. That is, Elburg is home to the National Organ Museum, and we suspect that organs play a significant tune in the full history of our realm!

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TWOMP – The Wall Of Moving Pictures