Dendermonde sits at the mouth of the river Dender - the name means exactly that, Dender-mouth - where the smaller river drops itself into the big Scheldt and is carried away toward Antwerp and the sea. The town has been making something of this position for over a thousand years. Otto II built a fort here in the 10th century. A city charter arrived in 1233. By the 14th century there was a cloth hall and a belfry on the market square, both still standing, both now UNESCO World Heritage Sites along with the city's tucked-away béguinage. The Grote Markt is the kind of Flemish square that looks staged for a tourism photo - gabled facades, café terraces, a town hall with a clock that has watched the same view for six hundred years.

Sitting at the meeting of two rivers means everyone with an army wants you. The Spaniards under Alexander Farnese sacked Dendermonde in 1572. The French under Louis XIV showed up in 1667 and were sent home wet - the defenders opened the dikes and flooded the surrounding countryside, turning the approach into an unfightable swamp. The Duke of Marlborough did the heaviest damage in 1706. The Austrians fortified the place against future French ambitions. In September 1914, the opening weeks of the First World War cost the city more than half its housing and the entirety of its archives, both bombed or burned. The Dendermondenaars rebuilt. They had been rebuilding, in one form or another, for nine hundred years.

The Ros Beiaard procession tells a story older than the city - the legend of a wooden horse who carried four brothers, the Heemskinderen, to safety from the wrath of Charlemagne. Once a decade, the city stages it. Four real brothers, vetted and chosen years in advance, ride atop the great wooden horse as it is wheeled through streets so packed you cannot see the cobbles. The next ride is in 2030; the one before was in 2022 (delayed from 2020 due to the pandemic). The Parade of the Giants - three towering wicker-and-wood figures named Indian, Mars, and Goliath - takes place every August, also recognized by UNESCO. Dendermonde is, quietly, one of the most folklore-rich corners of Flanders.

The Dendermonde Abbey, a Benedictine house, holds something rare even by Belgian-monastery standards: an original twelfth-century manuscript of Hildegard of Bingen's songs, known as the Dendermonde Codex. The composer Johannes Ockeghem, whose polyphony shaped the entire Renaissance, has long been associated with Dendermonde, though modern scholarship places his birth around 1410 in Saint-Ghislain, in the County of Hainaut. The belfry on the market square holds a working carillon - bells that ring the hour and, on the right summer evening, ring out longer pieces above the cafe tables. The Church of Our Lady keeps two paintings by Anthony van Dyck. For a city of forty-six thousand people, the cultural inventory is preposterous.

Modern Dendermonde has had its share of strange and dark headlines. In August 2006, twenty-eight prisoners escaped the local prison by tying their bedsheets together and climbing the wall after the lock on a cell door gave way. Seven were caught within hours; a few turned up much later, in Italy and Russia. Three years on, on 23 January 2009, the village of Sint-Gillis-bij-Dendermonde lost two babies and a childcare worker in an attack on the Het Fabeltjesland daycare - a wound the whole municipality still carries. Today the city is the kind of place where a former Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, grew up walking the same market square his great-grandfather walked, and where the rugby club has been quietly winning the national league nearly every year since 2016. Two rivers, a belfry, a wooden horse. The proportions are right.