City Hall Zottegem

Those who are lucky and come to walk during the opening hours of the Tourism Office in the former town hall at the Market of Zottegem can get the key to the crypt. In that crypt beneath the Our Lady Assumed into Heaven Church, accessible via a dome, lie the skeletons of Lamoraal, Count of Egmont, and his wife Sabina of Bavaria. “Other historical figures receive eternal rest in a sarcophagus,” says De Looze. “Here, the couple lies exposed. Unique.” Egmont was beheaded on June 5, 1568, in the Grand Place of Brussels.

In the Council Chamber of the town hall hangs the 19th-century painting Les têtes coupées. “To the archers' guild, of which he was emperor, Egmont had requested to have his body brought to Zottegem after his death,” De Looze explains. “And so it happened.”

Mediahuis België