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 some of the key moments in Antwerp’s history that made the port evolve into the global port it is today.
‘Antwerp blue’
In this first episode of ‘Geerts & De Schelde’, Marc Geerts starts at Het Steen, which originated around 1200 as the gatehouse of a larger castle. Today, the stately building is still a silent witness to so many pivotal moments in Antwerp’s history; from the first raids by the Vikings, the rise of trade after Bruges silted up to the fall of Antwerp in 1585.
And did you know that the world-famous Delft Blue actually has its origins in Antwerp, and can still be admired there today in… Het Steen.
