Gëlle Fra

Locals call her the Gëlle Fra — "the Golden Lady" — and she's been through more than most monuments ever do. She stands twenty-one metres up on a granite obelisk, gilded bronze, holding out a laurel wreath as if to crown the country below her. At the foot of the column are two soldiers in unpolished bronze: one lying dead, the other sitting over him. All three figures are by Claus Cito, a sculptor from Bascharage, and the monument is for the Luxembourgers who volunteered for the French army in the First World War — 3,700 of them, of whom 2,000 did not come back, more than one in a hundred of the whole population.

She was unveiled in 1923, right here on Place de la Constitution — without the Grand Duchess or the bishop, who stayed away from a monument that Catholic opinion found too worldly. Then on the 21st of October 1940 the occupying Germans pulled the whole thing down, and its removal set off some of the earliest public protests against the occupation. Parts of the monument were rescued. The Golden Lady herself simply disappeared.

She stayed disappeared for forty years. In January 1980 she was found, whole, hidden beneath the main stand of the national football stadium. The monument was rebuilt to its original design and unveiled again by Grand Duke Jean on the 23rd of June 1985, the national holiday, and by then it stood for the fallen of the Second World War, Korea and the Spanish Civil War as well. So what you're looking at is really a monument to a monument — a symbol important enough to be a target, and hidden well enough to outlast the people who wanted it gone.

In 2010 she came down again, briefly and on purpose: she went to Shanghai, to stand at the door of Luxembourg's pavilion at the World Expo.