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 reporting series in which he takes Flows 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 en de Schelde’, which gives you an insight into the origins of the Antwerp port. In eight short episodes, Geerts looks back, in his own style, at a number of key moments in Antwerp’s history that have ensured the port evolved into the world port it is today.
Polder villages
In the penultimate episode of Geerts en de Schelde, Marc Geerts looks back briefly at the port’s expansion towards the north. That expansion caused four polder villages to disappear in the middle of last century: Oorderen, Oosterweel, Wilmarsdonk and Lillo village. Lillo Fort, the church tower of Wilmarsdonk and the Sint-Jan-de-Dooperkerk of Oosterweel remained and have since been surrounded by industrial and port areas for years.
Before the expansion of the Waasland port, Doel was long on the list of villages that had to make way for the expansion of the port on the Left Bank. For just over fifty years, residents were kept in the dark about the future of the polder village. In 2023, the Flemish government finally decided that Doel should be allowed to stay and become a liveable village again. Geerts closes the seventh episode with the legend of giant Antigoon and the Roman soldier Brabo.
Next week we complete the series Geerts en de Schelde with stories about, among other things, the first containers in the port of Antwerp.
Missed an episode of ‘Geerts en de Schelde’? No problem. You can watch all episodes here.
