By the end of 1918, two-thirds of Roeselare was rubble. The German army had used the city for four years as a base camp for the troops fighting just up the road at Diksmuide, which meant British aircraft had spent the same four years bombing it. What the bombers left, the artillery on both sides reduced further. And yet most of what a visitor sees today - the rococo city hall on the central market square, the medieval belfry that anchors the UNESCO inscription, the parish churches, the seminary - is older than the war. It was all painstakingly rebuilt in the 1920s, brick for brick, from prewar drawings. Roeselare is the kind of Flemish city that looks five hundred years old because it had to remember how to be five hundred years old.
The city's name is older than its city. Roeselare comes from two Germanic words meaning "reed" and "open space" - a marsh in a forest glade, which is what the first Frankish settlers found here in the early Middle Ages. The first written mention is from 821 or 822, when the local domain was deeded to Elnon Abbey. By 957, under Baldwin III of Flanders, the village had the right to build fortifications and hold a public market. According to a colorful local legend, Baldwin Iron Arm - Count of Flanders - kidnapped Judith, the daughter of King Charles the Bold of West Francia, in Senlis in 862 and brought her to a fortress that stood where Rumbeke Castle now stands, just outside the modern city. Whether the legend is true or not, it does fix Roeselare firmly in the political geography of the early County of Flanders.
The medieval city ran on cloth. From the time of its first charter in the mid-13th century until the late 16th, weavers and dyers and cloth merchants made the town wealthy enough to build a market hall and a belfry - the squat brick tower whose successor, rebuilt after WWI, is now part of the UNESCO Belfries of Belgium and France inscription. Then came the catastrophes. Maximilian of Austria destroyed the town at the end of the 15th century. The market hall and Saint Michael church were rebuilt in 1500. Iconoclasts ransacked the churches in 1566. The Eighty Years' War cut off the English wool supply and killed the cloth industry. The wars of Louis XIV cycled through with their usual plundering. By the time the 18th century brought calm, Roeselare had to learn to be something other than a textile town - and built itself the rococo city hall that still presides over the market square.
The Rodenbach family is a kind of one-family microcosm of 19th-century Roeselare. Several Rodenbachs took part in the Belgian Revolution of 1830 - some as soldiers, some as diplomats. Pedro, Alexander, and two other brothers founded the brewery in 1821 that still operates on the eastern side of town, producing the Flemish red sour ales for which the city is now beer-famous. Their grand-nephew Albrecht (1856-1880) became one of the leading Flemish-language poets of the century before dying young at 24. The family's seminary trained another celebrated Flemish poet, Guido Gezelle, and the missionary Constant Lievens. Meanwhile the surrounding countryside was raising what locals call the flandriens - hard, stubborn road cyclists who learned to suffer on cobblestoned farm roads in the rain. The first Belgian winner of the Tour de France, Odiel Defraeye, came from this region; so did world champions Jean-Pierre Monseré, Patrick Sercu, Benoni Beheyt, and Freddy Maertens. The KOERS cycling museum in the city center is built around that lineage.
World War I treated Roeselare badly twice - once on each side. The German army used it as a forward base for the fighting on the Yser front in nearby Diksmuide; British aircraft repeatedly bombed it; and by the armistice in 1918 something close to two-thirds of the city's buildings were damaged or destroyed. The Transport Office of the Devastated Territories of West Flanders was set up at Spanjestraat 56 to manage reconstruction. Then in May 1940 the Belgian army made its last stand against the Wehrmacht on the outskirts of the city, on 27 and 28 May, before capitulating. Four years of German occupation followed - lighter on infrastructure damage this time, but heavy on everything else. The city was liberated in September 1944 by the Polish 1st Armoured Division under General Stanislaw Maczek, an event Roeselare has been thanking the Poles for ever since: there is a museum to Maczek and his soldiers built into a former German communications bunker on the edge of town.
These days the city is a regional commercial center, with the Ooststraat as its main shopping spine and a weekly Tuesday morning market spread across the Botermarkt and the Polenplein - the latter named for those same Polish liberators. The food industry employs a lot of people. The volleyball club Knack Roeselare plays in the CEV Champions League. The 2021-22 Formula E world champion, Stoffel Vandoorne, grew up here and still lives in town. Roeselare is twinned with Clonmel, in County Tipperary, Ireland - a sister-city tie that has produced a steady traffic of cycling teams and beer enthusiasts in both directions. The belfry still rings the hours. The rococo city hall still presides. The brewery, somehow, has been making the same sour red beer in the same oak vats for two centuries straight.
Roeselare sits at 50.945°N, 3.123°E in West Flanders, about midway between the coastal plain and the French border. The closest airfield is EBKT (Wevelgem-Kortrijk) some 17 km south; EBOS (Ostend-Bruges) is around 35 km north. From the air the city is identifiable by its dense red-roofed center grouped around the white stone belfry, with the long industrial corridor of the Rodenbach brewery and the Roeselare-Lys canal stretching east-southeast.