Glacis

For eleven months of the year this is the biggest car park in the city, twelve hundred cars on an empty field between the old town and the Limpertsberg. It is empty because the fortress wanted it so. A glacis is the open slope in front of the walls, kept bare of every tree and building so that a sentry could see anything that moved and a gun could reach it; when the walls came down after 1867 and the park was laid out on their line, this field was simply left as it was. Every plan to build on it since — a neo-Gothic pilgrimage cathedral for three thousand in 1900, a new grammar school in 1940, Léon Krier's arcaded squares in 1978, the housing ministry's idea in 2016 — has come to nothing.

The reason it never will is the Schueberfouer. On the 20th of October 1340 John the Blind, King of Bohemia and Count of Luxembourg, founded a fair to be held on the eve of Saint Bartholomew's day and to last eight days, on the Schuedbierg — the Holy Ghost plateau at the other end of the old town, which gave the fair its name. For four and a half centuries it was a market, one of the great ones of the region, for cattle and cloth and pots and everything a household needed; the shows and the games crept in during the eighteenth century, the Ferris wheel and the rollercoaster in the twentieth. It moved out here to the Glacis in 1890, and it has opened here every August since, in the days before Saint Bartholomew's, for twenty days: nearly two hundred attractions, a dozen big rides, fifty restaurants frying fish, and two million visitors in a country of six hundred thousand.

It has held other things too. In the hungry winter of 1916, under the first occupation, this was where the city handed out potatoes. And the strip along the top, the Päerdsmaart, was the horse market. Come in August; come any other month and walk across it, and remember what the emptiness was for.