Marken was not always an island. In 1164, a North Sea storm surge called the Saint Juliana flood inundated huge stretches of low-lying Frisia and the marshes south of it; over the following centuries, further floods widened a chain of lakes into the brackish inland sea the Dutch came to call the Zuiderzee. Marken, once part of the mainland's edge, found itself surrounded by salt water. The people who stayed built their houses on werfs - artificial earthen mounds made of soil, peat, and household waste packed down hard. Four of those mounds, the Moeniswerf, Rozenwerf, Grote werf, and Witte werf, still hold their clusters of houses. When the sea came over the dikes, as it did regularly into the twentieth century, water filled the lanes between the mounds and the houses stood above it like small wooden ships waiting out a swell.

Once the village settled into being an island, fishing became almost the only work. The Zuiderzee was rich in herring and eel, and Marken's men sailed out in flat-bottomed botters to chase the runs while the women managed the houses, the mending, and the curing of what came home. The population grew steadily; the houses crowded the mounds. Then, on May 28, 1932, workers closed the final gap in the Afsluitdijk - a 32-kilometer barrier dam that sealed the Zuiderzee off from the North Sea. Within a few years, the trapped salt water turned fresh and the fish disappeared. The Zuiderzee became the IJsselmeer, and Marken's fleet became a small, mostly ceremonial thing. A generation later, in 1957, a causeway was finished between the village and the mainland near Monnickendam. The island stopped being an island. The work of the island, though, had already been gone for a quarter century.

Long before the fishing failed, Marken had attracted a different kind of visitor. Nineteenth-century travelers from Amsterdam and London came to see what they considered a vanished world preserved - the wooden houses, the wooden shoes, and especially the distinctive Marken costume, a layered ensemble in red, black, white, and floral cottons that had grown more elaborate as the village had grown more isolated. Tourism never really stopped. Today the traditional dress is mostly worn for visitors and on certain festival days, but the older women of the village still own the full set, and the Sijtje Boes house - named for a famously enterprising local woman who turned her parlor into one of the first souvenir shops on the island in the 1890s - has been selling Marker fabrics for over a century. The costume has become a thing the village performs about itself, partly for income and partly, you sense, to remind everyone what was once daily life.

At the southeastern tip of the peninsula stands a white lighthouse on a low rocky headland. Sailors called it Het Paard van Marken - the Horse of Marken - because from a certain angle the spit of land looked like a horse's head pushed out into the lake. A primitive beacon had warned ships off this point since the early 1700s. The current iron-framed tower went up in 1839, designed by J. Valk, the same engineer who built the lighthouse on Urk. It has been a listed monument since 1970 and is now somebody's home, which means you can walk to it across the rocks but you cannot go inside. Stand near it on a still day and the IJsselmeer reaches off toward the horizon with nothing on it - no working fleet, no salt smell, just the wide flat water that used to be a sea.