typically.nl

This subject leads itself to so many puns it is funnier for me to stick to the facts and let y’all laugh amongst yourselves. The subject is dikes (dijken), sans any fingers in holes (grr! couldn’t resist) but with a couple of facts about these water stopping devices.

As the eskimos (alledgedly) have hundreds of words for snow, Nederlanders have literally tens of words for dijken: rivierdijk, zeedijk, ringdijk, binnenwaterdijk, buitenwaterdijk… you get the idea. But what, in actual fact, is a dijk?

Ringvaartdijk, Amsterdam Oost

It is a big heap of dirt that keeps water away.

You’d feel cheated out of your hard-earned money if I left it at that, so allow me to ramble on about these quintessential Nederlandse things. Today’s post is about the ringvaartdijk (pictured above) i.e. circular water dike. This type of dike has been instrumental in creating the Nederlandse landscape. They work as such: imagine a lake you would like to build houses/grow grass/produce cheese on. You divide this lake into manageable chunks by building dams in it.

Once you have your basic chunk you can start milling the water out of it. You do this by pumping it up and throwing it across (or under, as it happens) the dams. The water level drops and soon enough it’s land ahoy. But what to do with all the water that is now outside your patch of new earth? Simple. You pump this out some more until you’ve reached sea. Ringvaarten are the key step. They surround the (soon former) lake and are generally situated above sea level. Once the excess water is in the ringvaart, it can flow out into sea.

Ringvaartdijk, Amsterdam Oost, from the bottom of the former lake

As you can see, the difference in height is quite noticeable. The photo above was taken from the bottom of the former lake Watergraafsmeer, now a residential district of Amsterdam.

Typically, every dijk had a molen (windmill) for the pumping action but these days the water is pumped out with electric pumps, nicely tucked away in nondescript buildings. And yes, every day, every year, water is in fact pumped out of the former lakes. If this doesn’t happen, they fill back up again eventually. There’s no fighting nature even in Nederland.

Since Dijk is so instrumental to .nl, we have a rock group named so, many expressions and there’s even a website by American photographer Rachel James named aan de dijk.

I will cover other forms of dikes in coming posts.