Dutch send bell made of Russian missiles from Ukraine to Prague’s Old Town
On Tuesday, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and his wife, Máxima, arrive in Prague. One of the highlights of the first-ever state visit of a Dutch monarch to Czechia will be the christening of a unique bell cast in the Netherlands for the Church of the Most Holy Salvator. Remarkably, the bell was made using metal from Russian munitions used in the war against Ukraine.
"This bell has a lot of symbolism in it and it's a very special project for us," says owner Joost Eijsbouts at the Royal Eijsbouts bell shop in Asten, the Netherlands, after gently striking the bell standing on its pedestal on the ground with a mallet.
Just as bells were melted down into weapons during wars in the past, the opposite is true for this bell of freedom; instead, weapons have been transformed into a bell.
“To use material designed for violence and turn it into something peaceful is a good idea,” says the Dutch bell-maker, who received a decoration from King Willem-Alexander last year.
New bell after 109 years
The idea originated with Ondřej Boháč from the Sanctus Castulus association, which returns bells to Prague churches. The association is returning a bell to the Church of the Holy Saviour at Charles Bridge in the Old Town after more than a century. The original bell was taken by the army in 1916 during the First World War.
"In this case, we accelerated the process a lot. We made the whole bell in two and a half weeks. Normally it takes six to eight weeks. The speed shows that we put an extraordinary amount of effort into it," says Eijsbouts.
A symbol of hope
The bell, which weighs more than 200 kilograms and measures almost 70 centimeters in diameter, has inscriptions in Czech, Dutch, and Ukrainian. Alongside a quotation from the Bible, it calls for peace and freedom and bears an expression of friendship between the Netherlands, Czechia, and Ukraine. After it was cast and cooled down, the bell had to be tuned.
“We are able to design the bell to within one-hundredth of a semitone. However, you can’t achieve that level of accuracy in production. So, we cast the bells slightly thicker and then remove metal from the inside to achieve the correct tone,” says Joep van Brussel, director of the family-run bell shop.
In this case, it was even more complicated because the traditional bronze was mixed with brass from a seven-pound Russian artillery round of 122 mm caliber imported from Ukraine.
"Brass contains zinc, a metal we don’t normally want in bells, so we expected it to affect the sound. However, the result pleasantly surprised us; the bell sounds very nice,” adds Eijsbouts.
In addition to the artillery round, the remnants of a Russian S-300 missile were used to make the heart of the bell. Both pieces of ammunition originally intended for warfare and killing people were supplied by the Ukrainian embassy in Prague.
“It’s obviously quite extraordinary to add metal from something associated with pain and death to a bell. The fact that we can transform it and give it a completely different purpose makes us feel good,” concludes the owner of the last bell shop in the Netherlands, which has been in operation since 1872.
