For the Flows summer series 2024, we are looking for stories of people from the maritime and logistics world who have a special passion or hobby. Each week you will also see an episode of ‘Geerts en de Schelde’, in which Marc Geerts takes us through the rich history of the port of Antwerp.
Entrepreneur Marc Geerts passed on his transport company to his three sons and has since thrown himself into his new career as a city guide in Antwerp. From there, the idea was born to create a reportage series for Flows, in which Marc Geerts takes us through the rich history of the Antwerp port.
Geerts could listen for hours to his great-grandparents’ stories about the two world wars. “My great-grandmother was born in 1896 and she still knew stories of her grandparents who had lived before Belgium’s independence,” he says. “I was enormously fascinated and gradually started looking up more and more information about this in history books. I wanted to check in that way whether those stories were true.”
Together with Marc Geerts, Flows canned the reportage series ‘Geerts & De Schelde’, which gives you an insight into the origins of the port of Antwerp. In eight short episodes, Geerts looks back, in his own style, at a number of key moments in Antwerp’s history, which ensured that the port evolved into the world port it is today.
Peter the Great and Napoleon
In the third episode of ‘Geerts & De Schelde’, Geerts talks about Antwerp’s strategic location. Throughout history, several important figures showed a special interest in Antwerp as a place of trade, but also because of its expertise in shipbuilding, among other things. For instance, Russian Tsar Peter the Great is said to have visited Antwerp for three days in the spring of 1717.
Napoleon Bonaparte also visited Antwerp on several occasions. Between 1795 and 1815, the period of the French occupation, Bonaparte built the largest naval arsenal in all of Europe in Antwerp. With vast modern shipyards and grand docks in the north of the city, he worked on 10 liners and numerous frigates every year.
Did you miss the previous episode of ‘Geerts and the Scheldt’? No problem. You can watch it here.
