Chapel of Our Lady of Hulsterlo - Damme

This little chapel is located on the Zuiddijk near a renovated 18th-century farm.

So-called "Chapel Our Lady of Hulsterlo", after a disappeared Chapel of Our Lady at the intersection with the Oude Sluissedijk. It is a whitewashed brick chapel with a pitched plinth under a gable roof (Flemish tiles). Arched entrance with partly glazed door (rod division). Whitewashed interior finish, with multicolored cement tile floor. Altar with processing of some tiles in Delft tradition; polychromed statue of Our Lady and Child. Basket arch niche in the back wall.

Guild of Our Lady of Hulsterloo was a brotherhood in Bruges that was founded around 1340/1350. The confreres first venerated the miraculous statue of Our Lady of Hulsterloo in Bruges, in the chapel of the Beggarden, from around 1410 in the parish of Sinte-Catharina near Damme.

Hulsterloo near Hulst in Zeeland was first mentioned in the medieval (1250-1270) animal epic Van den fox Reynaerde. The chapel that was built by the Premonstratensians of the Drongen Abbey, and which housed the statue of Our Lady of Hulsterlo, became a famous place of pilgrimage and in the County of Flanders the pilgrimage to this place was often carried out in sentences such as penance imposed.

Some Bruges residents decided to set up an association whose aim was to venerate Our Lady of Hulsterloo. The confrérie, already well organised, was located in the monastery of the Beggarden in Bruges' Katelijnestraat. Probably at the beginning of the 15th century the guild built a chapel in the Sint-Catharina parish , just outside Damme in the direction of Vivenkapelle, and from then on organized pilgrimages from Bruges. The guild must have had a copy of the miraculous statue of Mary to venerate, first in Bruges, then in the chapel at Damme.

In 1620 the chapel had completely disappeared . A document from that time mentions something about the former Hulsterloo chapel and in 1647 it is written about the chapelle de Ulsterloo being in ruins .

Willem Vandenameele