Oude Kerk

What it is

The Oude Kerk is the oldest building in Amsterdam and, since 2012, a museum of contemporary art that happens to be a medieval parish church. It began as a wooden chapel raised around 1250 on a levee of clay laid down where the Amstel met the IJ, on ground that served as a burial place from the start. The Bishop of Utrecht consecrated the building to Saint Nicholas, patron of sailors, on 17 September 1306; the oldest surviving fabric dates from that period. When the Nieuwe Kerk was consecrated on Dam Square in 1409, Amsterdammers began calling the older building simply the Oude Kerk, and the name stuck. It kept growing until it reached its full hall-church form around 1570, the Lady Chapel having been added in 1552. The Beeldenstorm and then the Alteratie of 26 May 1578, when the Catholic city council was deposed, stripped the interior: altars removed, statues smashed, images painted over. What the visitor meets today is that emptiness, deliberately kept. The Oude Kerk commissions two large solo works a year from living artists, made for this building rather than moved into it, and shows them in the nave the Reformation cleared.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

The first impression is scale and bare white plaster: high Gothic walls, columns, vaults and windows with almost nothing hung on them. The detail is above and below. Look up at the wooden vaults, where fragments of medieval painting survived the whitewash; look down at a floor made almost entirely of tombstones. Around 60,000 people were buried here between the thirteenth century and 1865, under more than 2,000 stones. Saskia van Uylenburgh, Rembrandt's first wife, lies near the small transept organ. Tombstone 99 in the choir ambulatory belongs to Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, city organist and composer, who died in 1621. In the Mary Chapel is the stone of Jacob Matroos Beeldsnijder, the one black person known to be buried in the church, freed by his father in 1781, and above it the sixteenth-century stained glass. Carved tomb monuments stand clear of the floor, among them that of Jacob van Heemskerck, who wintered on Nova Zembla with Willem Barentsz and died fighting the Spanish fleet off Gibraltar. The choir screen carries the text commemorating 1578. Two organs remain in use, the Vater-Muller of 1724 to 1742 and the transept organ of 1965. Contemporary work sits among all this, including Giorgio Andreotta Calo's red window of 2018 in the Holy Sepulchre and Misha de Ridder's photograph #0095 [Inside] of 2017. Side chapels hold archival presentations, and a ticket covers them.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

How long to spend

The Oude Kerk answers this itself: following the highlights with the booklet and the free audio tour takes about 45 minutes. That is the figure to plan around if the church is all a visitor wants. The same page says the exhibition on top of that varies, because one commission may be a single installation read in five minutes and another a set of works spread through the aisles. This guide allows 75 minutes for a normal visit, which is the operator's 45 plus half an hour for whatever is currently installed, and that number is the guide's judgement rather than something the Oude Kerk publishes. There is no time limit once inside; the church states a visitor may stay as long as they like until closing. Two practical constraints bound the visit. Sunday opens at 13:00 and closes at 17:30, so the whole day is four and a half hours wide and a late Sunday arrival leaves very little. And a tower tour, when the season is running, is a scheduled slot on top of the church visit rather than time absorbed into it, so a combined visit needs the tour hour reserved separately.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Season and crowds

The Oude Kerk opens Monday to Saturday 10:00 to 18:00 and Sunday 13:00 to 17:30. It names its own quiet times: the church is generally quieter before 12:00, and Tuesday and Wednesday are usually the least busy days. A Tuesday or Wednesday morning is therefore the best combination available, and it is also when the empty nave reads best, before the surrounding streets fill. The short Sunday window exists because the building is still in parish use; a service is held every Sunday morning at 11:00 and a vesper at 18:00, and the museum hours sit between them. Closures are few but absolute. The church shuts on 27 April for King's Day and on 25 December, and it closes for the installation and dismantling of exhibitions, which in 2026 means 28 September to 2 October and 9 to 12 November. On 24 December it closes early, at 17:00. Every other public holiday it stays open. One seasonal item is worth timing a visit around: the Oudekerkstoren tower tours run from late April to the end of October, Wednesday to Sunday, and in 2026 that season is 25 April to 31 October. Outside those months the tower cannot be climbed at all.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Tickets

Tickets are sold online and at the entrance desk, and one ticket covers the art in the main church hall, the historic side chapels with their archival presentations, and the free audio tour in Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish or Italian. On the Oude Kerk's own opening hours and admission page the adult price is 14.50 euro, students and 13 to 17 year olds pay 7.50 euro, under-13s are free and a CJP pass costs 7 euro. The church's FAQ page contradicts this, listing 13.50 euro for an adult, 7 euro for a student, 3.50 euro for children of 6 to 12 and free entry only under 6. Both figures are the operator's; the dedicated prices page is the more recently maintained of the two and carries the 2026 closure dates, but a visitor should expect either and check at the desk. Entry is free with a Museumkaart, an I amsterdam City Card, an ICOM or AICA card, a VriendenLoterij VIP Card, a Stadspas or the Friends Pass, and a companion accompanying a disabled visitor is admitted free. The church plus tower combination is 22 euro for an adult and can only be bought together with church admission. The Oude Kerk is entirely cashless. Paid tickets cannot be cancelled, though they can be rescheduled, and the timeslot on an online ticket is advisory rather than binding.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

No car is needed and the Oude Kerk advises against one: it stands between Warmoesstraat and Oudezijds Voorburgwal in the oldest part of the centre, where the streets are narrow, largely pedestrian and awkward to drive. The simplest approach is on foot from Centraal Station, which the church puts at eight minutes. By tram, routes 2, 12, 13 and 17 stop at Nieuwezijds Kolk and routes 4, 14 and 24 at Dam, each a short walk away through the lanes. Metro lines 51, 53 and 54 stop at Nieuwmarkt, on the far side of the old centre. Bus 22 stops at Prins Hendrikkade by Centraal Station. Anyone who does drive should use the Q-Park garage next to the Bijenkorf, entrance at Beursplein 15, about five minutes on foot from the church. There is also a boat option: the Culture Ferry, an eco-neutral service linking cultural sites in the centre and east of the city by water, includes the Oude Kerk on its route, with tickets sold separately at cultuurferry.nl and church admission not included. The address for any of these is Oudekerksplein 23, 1012 GX Amsterdam.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What to watch out for

Restoration is permanent here. The Oude Kerk says outright that craftsmen have worked on the building for centuries and that scaffolding will be somewhere in view; two north aisle windows returned in spring 2025 after years away, which briefly opened up the interior, but a scaffold-free photograph is luck rather than planning. Accessibility is partial and the church is candid about it: most of the main hall is reachable by wheelchair and there is an accessible toilet, but the historic side rooms are not accessible, and those rooms hold the archival displays. Assistance dogs are welcome on a lead. There is no cloakroom, so anything carried in stays carried. Food and drink may not be brought inside; the Koffieschenkerij in the former sacristy on Oudekerksplein, open daily 09:00 to 18:00, gives ticket holders ten per cent off drinks. The church is cashless, so a visitor with only notes and coins cannot buy a ticket at the desk. The building is still a working parish church on Sundays, which is why the museum day is short then. And the Oude Kerk sits in the middle of De Wallen; the square outside is not a quiet forecourt, and the contrast between the street and the nave is part of the experience rather than a fault in it.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Photography

Photography is permitted. The Oude Kerk asks only that no flash is used and that other visitors are respected, and neither the visitor information nor the FAQ mentions a separate photography permit or a charge. Flash would be useless here in any case: the interior is lit almost entirely through clear glass, and the whole character of the room is the way daylight falls on white plaster and grey stone. That makes the light the main variable. Morning, before 12:00, is both the quietest time the church names and the time when the nave is brightest from the south side, so the two reasons to come early coincide. The floor rewards a camera pointed down more than most interiors do, because it is a continuous field of carved tombstones, and a low angle along it picks up the lettering that a straight-down shot flattens. Look up for the painted wooden vaults, which need a steady hand rather than a flash. The strongest colour in the building is Giorgio Andreotta Calo's red window in the Holy Sepulchre, which throws colour into the surrounding stone and reads best from a few metres back rather than head on. Outside, the Oudekerksplein gives the only clear view of the tower, and the surrounding houses press close enough that a wide lens is the honest choice.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Where it is

Nearby

External links

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