Ghent is a city and a municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is the capital and largest city of the East Flanders province, and the third largest in the country, after Brussels and Antwerp. It is a port and university city.
Trappist beer is brewed by Trappist monks. Thirteen Trappist monasteries—six in Belgium, two in the Netherlands, and one each in Austria, Italy, England, France, and Spain—currently produce beer, but the Authentic Trappist Product label is assigned by the International Trappist Association (ITA) to just ten breweries which meet their strict criteria. As of 2021, Achel is no longer recognized as a Trappist brewery because it does not have any living monks.
Orval Abbey is a Cistercian monastery founded in 1132 in the Gaume region of Belgium and is located in Villers-devant-Orval, part of Florenville, Wallonia in the province of Luxembourg. The abbey is well known for its history and spiritual life but also for its local production of the Trappist beer Orval and a specific cheese.
Beer in Belgium includes pale ales, lambics, Flemish red ales, sour brown ales, strong ales and stouts. In 2018, there were 304 active breweries in Belgium, including international companies, such as AB InBev, and traditional breweries including Trappist monasteries. On average, Belgians drink 68 litres of beer each year, down from around 200 each year in 1900. Most beers are bought or served in bottles, rather than cans, and almost every beer has its own branded, sometimes uniquely shaped, glass. In 2016, UNESCO inscribed Belgian beer culture on their list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
The Flemish Diamond is the Flemish reference to a network of four metropolitan areas in Belgium, three of which are in the central provinces of Flanders, together with the Brussels Capital Region. It consists of four agglomerations which form the four corners of an abstract diamond shape: Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp and Leuven. Over 5 million people live in this area, with a population density of about 820 per km2.
Willy F. Vande Walle is a Belgian academic, author, Japanologist and Sinologist.
Westmalle Abbey, otherwise the Trappist Abbey of Westmalle, is a monastery of the Cistercians of Strict Observance in Westmalle in the Belgian province of Antwerp.
Frans Van Cauwelaert, was a Belgian Roman Catholic politician and lawyer.
Frank Donck is a Belgian businessman. He is a member of the business club De Warande and director of KBC Group. He is a son of Jef Donck, who owned Comelco, which was sold to Campina.
The Diocese of Ghent is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or diocese of the Catholic Church in Belgium. It is a suffragan in the ecclesiastical province of the metropolitan Archdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels. The patron of the diocese is Saint Bavo of Ghent.
Henri Maria Dymphna André Laurent "Rik" Torfs is a Belgian canon law scholar and media personality. He is a former Senator for the Christian Democratic and Flemish party in the Belgian Federal Parliament and a former Rector of the Catholic University of Leuven.
Lucas Van Looy S.D.B. is a Belgian prelate of the Catholic Church who was Bishop of Ghent from 2004 to 2019. He worked as a missionary in South Korea for more than a decade and held leadership positions with the Salesians from 1984 to 2003.
Lode Aerts, identified also as Lodewijk Aerts, is a Belgian prelate of the Catholic Church who has been Bishop of Bruges since December 2016.
Arthur Théodore Verhaegen was a Gothic Revival Belgian architect and a politician of the Catholic Party, one of the founders of Belgian Christian democracy. He was a grandson of the politician and lawyer Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen.
Oscar Joliet was a scholar-priest who served between 1948 and 1969 as the Auxiliary bishop of Ghent.
Antoine Philippe De Schryver (1924–2005) was a Belgian art historian and professor at the University of Ghent, where he lectured on History of Book Illumination. He was specialized in the field of illuminated manuscripts in the Southern Netherlands, 15th century painting, and artists at the Burgundian Court.
Johan Decavele is a Belgian historian and archivist who worked as head of the Culture Department of the City of Ghent. He has mainly published on the history of Ghent and of the Reformation. He contributed to the Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, Monasticon belge, The Golden Delta of the Low Countries and The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation.
Events of the year 2019 in Belgium.
The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus by Dieric Bouts is a triptych panel painting in the collegiate church of Saint Peter's in Leuven, Belgium. It commemorates the martyrdom and death of a European Christian figure from the fourth century, Saint Erasmus. It shows the Emperor Diocletian as one of four observers in the background of the center panel, as well as Saints Jerome and Bernard of Clairvaux in the wings of the altarpiece. All nine figures appear to express an exceptional tranquility and calm, in a landscape setting that is contiguous across the three panels.
