Oldenzaal's carnival is one of the largest in the northern Netherlands, an event borrowed from Catholic Rhineland tradition but adapted to local flavor. The main parade weekend pulls in crowds three times the city's resident population, and the trucks - hoog en machtig, high and mighty - are built over months by neighborhood committees who guard their designs like state secrets. The Boeskool name is a kind of inverted boast: yes, we are a small Twente town that grew cabbages, and yes, that is exactly the point. Carnival here is older than the modern city's industrial identity and survives every economic shift the region throws at it. The local saying goes that for three days each February, Oldenzaal stops being itself and becomes more itself.

Long before the carnival trucks, there was the basilica. The Sint-Plechelmusbasiliek at the city center is one of the oldest standing churches in the Netherlands - a Romanesque structure with twelfth-century foundations, dedicated to Saint Plechelm, an eighth-century missionary who helped Christianize this corner of the country. The basilica's heavy sandstone walls and squat tower look more German than Dutch, which makes sense: Oldenzaal received city rights in 1249 and later joined the Hanseatic League as a subsidiary of the bigger trade city of Deventer, plugging the town into a commercial network that ran from Bergen to Novgorod. The basilica anchored a religious identity that survived the Reformation more intact here than in most Dutch cities, which is part of why the carnival tradition put down such deep roots.

Henri Max Corwin was born in Oldenzaal in 1903, a businessman and obsessive philatelist who, during the Second World War, used his networks and his nerve to shield Jewish victims of the Nazis. The full count of those he helped is not known, in the way these things often are not, because the work depended on secrecy and the survivors who told the story afterward could only speak for themselves. Corwin died in 1962 and is remembered locally as one of the quiet figures of the Dutch wartime resistance. The deeper truth he embodied - that ordinary people in ordinary Dutch towns sometimes did extraordinary things at terrible risk - is woven through the history of every community of his generation.

For a city of its size, Oldenzaal has produced a remarkable density of elite athletes. Ellen van Langen took 800m gold at the Barcelona 1992 Summer Olympics. Sanne Wevers won gold on the balance beam at Rio 2016, and her twin sister Lieke racked up four medals at the 2015 European Games. Bjorn Kuipers, born here in 1973, became one of the most respected football referees in the world, officiating the 2014 Champions League and Euro 2020 finals. Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink - a name so improbable that international commentators sometimes assume it is a joke - played 438 club matches as a Dutch international striker. Erik ten Hag, born in nearby Haaksbergen in 1970 and raised in Oldenzaal, coached AFC Ajax to a Champions League semifinal and later managed Manchester United. Boeskool-stad punches well above its weight.

Oldenzaal sits close enough to the German border that you can drive into Bad Bentheim for lunch. The A1 motorway from Amsterdam to Berlin runs past the city, and trains link it east into Germany and west across the Netherlands. That border position is the key to understanding the place: Twents is the local dialect, closer in some ways to Low German than to standard Dutch; the carnival tradition came across from Rhineland Catholicism; the trade networks pulled commerce from both directions for centuries. The city is Dutch through and through, but it is Dutch in a particular eastern way - shaped by the German-speaking lands a few kilometers up the road and very much aware of the difference.