Messevichters and murderers

Tremelo and especially Ninde are traditionally mentioned in the Brabant Kempen as the scene of the 'messevichters'. This work by the local artist Flor Hermans (1953) very expressively depicts what we have to imagine.

This had to do with the remoteness of the hamlets and the poverty of the population. There was no real village centre. The people lived around a small built-up core surrounded by poor arable land, poor heathland and forests. The inhabitants only went outside the boundaries of their hamlet for Sunday mass, the market or a fair. Cchauvinism gave rise to heated discussions. A quarrel was settled with the flick knife or the 'poignard'.

Rik Wouters, Tremeloos folklorist, devotes no less than twenty pages to the fighters in his work Tremelore 1900. But he can also put things into perspective:

"In the second half of the last century, the people of Tremelo were given the derisive name 'messevichters'. To acquire such a dubious reputation, a few things must have happened. And really, the gendarmes of Haacht had more than their hands full with those of Tremelo. The same goes for the lawyersin Louvain. The court heard the dialect from across the Dyle and the Laak practically every week. Yet such facts must be placed in time and landscape. This community may have had barbarous exponents, but it was by no means worse than elsewhere."

Source: R. Wouters and A. Verhoeven, Tremelore 1900, Haacht 1989

When we look at this image, we are struck by the hatred in the twisted gaze, the tense muscles, ready to lash out. The knife is a realistic representation of the 'liant', with its typical triangular, sharpened shape. In the left hand we see a gin bottle. Illegal stoking was another activity of the Tremelonaar. The pedestal refers to the cell door of the prison.

Jan Rymenams