The first written reference to the place dates from 1117, when it was recorded as Saventa. The etymology is contested. One theory says seven small ponds gave the village its name - zeven in Dutch means seven. A second points to sandy ground that held water - sabulous clay. A third reads zeven tommen, seven Gallo-Roman burial mounds. A fourth reads zaaivelden, sowing fields. The village center grew at the crossing of two important roads - between Vilvoorde and Tervuren, and between Brussels and Erps - with the church at the heart. The parish was established before the ninth century. The Abbey of Nivelles owned it from roughly the year 900. The right of ownership passed to the Diocese of Cambrai in 1147 and then to the Archdiocese of Mechelen in 1559. By the time Ferdinand van Boisschot became Lord of Zaventem in 1605 and was made a baron in 1621, the village had been ecclesiastically administered for seven centuries.

In 1621, Ferdinand van Boisschot - newly created Baron of Zaventem - wanted to donate an altarpiece to the parish church dedicated to its patron saint. He commissioned the painting from Anthony van Dyck, then around twenty-one years old and already a star pupil of Rubens. The painting shows Saint Martin, the church's patron, in a moment that anyone who has flown over wet Flanders in November will understand: he has dismounted in a winter storm and is cutting his cloak in half to give it to a freezing beggar. Van Dyck's Saint Martin has the unmistakable face of one of the de Boisschot family - probably Ferdinand himself, though art historians still argue about which de Boisschot it actually is. The painting has hung in the church for nearly four hundred years. It survived the French Revolution, both world wars, the construction of an international airport a kilometre away, and the steady draining away of every other artistic treasure from rural Flanders into the great museums of Antwerp and Brussels. The Lords of Zaventem's castle next door was demolished in the 1920s. The painting stayed.

Zaventem was an industrial town long before it was an airport. In 1208, Godfrey, Duke of Brabant ordered the Woluwe River straightened so that water mills along its course could be more reliably powered. Those mills ground grain at first, then made paper from the seventeenth century onward. The road from Leuven to Brussels was rebuilt between 1705 and 1710, and the village began its slow transition from agriculture to manufacturing. Steam engines arrived after 1850. The Brussels-Leuven railway line, inaugurated in 1866, cut Zaventem in two physically and accelerated industrialisation. Leather tanning grew up alongside the paper mills in the late nineteenth century. And in the early twentieth, the Compagnie Nationale Excelsior built some of its luxury automobiles - cars that would briefly contend with Rolls-Royce and Hispano-Suiza for the European luxury market - in a Zaventem factory. The Feldheim Villa, built by a wealthy tanning family, is now the municipal building. After the Second World War, most of the old industry collapsed under foreign competition. The airport replaced it as the economic engine.

Brussels Airport is the reason the world knows the word Zaventem, and it exists because of a 1958 fair. Belgium's original national airport was at Evere, started by the German occupiers during the First World War. By the late 1930s the Belgian government had bought land at neighbouring Melsbroek for a larger airfield, then lost it to a second German occupation. In the 1950s, looking ahead to the Brussels World's Fair of 1958 - the Expo 58 that produced the Atomium - the Belgian government decided Melsbroek was too small for the visitor traffic it expected. They chose Zaventem instead. Architects Maxime Brunfaut, Georges Bontinck, and Jos Moutschen designed the new terminal between 1956 and 1958: a 100-metre transit hall, 55 metres wide, 18 metres high, capped with a curved aluminium roof that was the height of mid-century optimism about flight. Today the airport handles roughly 19 million passengers a year, covers 1,245 hectares, and spreads across the municipal territories of Zaventem, Machelen, and Steenokkerzeel. Belgium's airspace is widely considered the most complex in Europe.

Zaventem is officially Dutch-speaking - it sits in Flemish Brabant, in the Flemish Region - but it is the closest Flemish commune to the bilingual Brussels-Capital Region, and the subdivision of Sint-Stevens-Woluwe shares a border with the Brussels municipality of Woluwe-Saint-Lambert. That frontier matters in Belgium more than visitors realise. Schools, shops, official documents, and political affiliations shift the moment you cross it. Around 37,000 people now live in Zaventem proper, but tens of thousands more commute through every weekday on the way to and from the airport, the office parks at Sint-Stevens-Woluwe (where Ingersoll Rand keeps its European headquarters), or the freight terminals at Brucargo. The town has a library, a music academy, and a US Department of Defense school in Sterrebeek for the children of NATO personnel. It also has Mariadal Castle - a nineteenth-century pile in the municipal park built by an archaeologist baron - and the seventeenth-century House of the Seven Knights, which was actually never owned by any knights but kept the name anyway. Zaventem accumulates history the way border towns always do, slightly sideways, slightly off the brochure.